The origin of the ethnonym “Russian. Why were Russians called Russians? The origin of the Russian people The history of the emergence of the Russian people

- these are Slavs + Finno-Ugric peoples + Golden Horde Christian Turks

In the ancient Russian state there were two political centers: Novgorod and Kyiv. The ethnic basis of the Novgorod principalitywere Ilmen Slovenes, and the main ethnic group of the Kiev Principality were glades. Klyuchevsky wrote about the glades that they, like many other Slavic tribes, came to the lands of modern Ukraine, approximately in the 6th century, and by the 9th century the glades were completely dependent on the Khazar Kaganate. The Slovenians of Ilmen, they are also Novgorodians, never depended on the Khazar Khaganate, and it was precisely they had the honor and luck to unite Russia.

The Ilmen Slovenes owned a large number of trading posts on the lands of the Finno-Ugric tribes - the territories of the modern Arkhangelsk and Vologda regions. In the 9th century, Novgorodians formed the settlements of Rostov and Murom, which, in the future, will become the key cities of the Vladimir-Suzdal principality. Also, they founded many settlements in the area of ​​modern Tver. In a word, their trading posts were in all the lands of the future Russian settlements of the North-East. It can be argued that the colonization of the North-East of Russia went through the lands already known and partially developed by the Novgorod-Slovenes.

Thus, the Great Russian ethnos originated in the interfluve of the Volga and Oka. Its genetic substrate was the Slavs who migrated here (starting from the 9th century) and the Finno-Ugric tribes inhabiting these lands, Muroma, Vesi and others.

The interaction of the Slavs and the Ugric peoples took place quite peacefully, since the Finno-Ugric population was rare and was mainly engaged in fishing and hunting. And the Slavs established small settlements and engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry. In economic terms, these tribes complemented each other, and there were no ideological obstacles to mixed marriages.

The Finno-Ugric tribes gradually adopted the Slavic language and the Orthodox faith of their energetic and standing at a higher level economic development of neighbors. They, of course, made their genetic contribution to the new ethnos, but they could not give a passionary impetus, since their level of passionarity was low.

Due to the religious tolerance of the Mongols, until 1314, nothing prevented the twinning of the ancient Russian princely-boyar elite with the Mongolian nobility. Russian princes often married the daughters and sisters of the Mongol khans, those converted to Orthodoxy and became mothers future Russian princes. An interesting fact is that Batu's son Sartak converted to Orthodoxy, and Batu appointed Alexander Nevsky as regent under him.

But in 1314 the situation changed dramatically, as Khan Uzbek ascended the throne of the Golden Horde - fanatical muslim. This meant the victory of the Muslim party, the rejection of the “yasa of Genghis Khan” as the moral basis of behavior and the inclusion of the Golden Horde in the Muslim superethnos.

And among the nomads who came with Batu to the Volga-Don steppes, there were many Nestorian Christians(which have been in Central Asia since the first centuries of Christianity). Upon coming to power, Khan Uzbek began to mercilessly persecute and exterminate the Nestorians in his Horde, however, at the same time retaining freedom of religion in the Russian principalities. Moreover, he consistently destroyed those Mongols who did not want to give up from the faith of the fathers - "". What was left for these people?

Muscovite Russia remained - a true ally of the Golden Horde. True, the ally is independent enough to protect the fugitives. And then, the Mongols and the steppes who came with them, and change the faith of the fathers and their conscience, they fled to Russia, they fled with whole clans; princes and ordinary warriors fled. But people who do not change their beliefs for the sake of profit or under pressure obviously have increased passionarity.

The Moscow princes willingly accepted these forced fugitives, gave them land and willingly took these experienced warriors into their squads. Therefore, on the Kulikovo field, when the Moscow prince and his allies defeated the Golden Horde temnik Mamai, the descendants of these fugitives fought in the army of Dmitry Donskoy. In just two generations, the former Horde and the Slavic population of the Moscow Principality merged.

Such a merger means mastering 1) the Russian language as a native language, 2) the adoption of the Orthodox faith (for illiterate warriors, the difference between Nestorianism and Orthodoxy was hardly significant) and, most importantly, 3) unity in defining enemies and friends. But the genetic traces of this "infusion of fresh passionate Horde blood" are clearly traced in Russian history and culture.

Lev Gumilyov gives a very significant list of surnames descending from Horde refugees:

• Aksakov, Alyabiev, Apraksin, Arakcheev, Arseniev, Akhmatov,
• Babichev, Balashov, Baranov, Basmanov, Baturin, Beketov, Berdyaev, Bibikov, Bilbasov, Bichurin, Boborykin, Bulgakov, Bunin, Burtsev, Buturlin, Bukharin,
• Velyaminov,
• Gogol, Godunov, Gorchakov, Gorshkov,
• Derzhavin,
• Epanchin, Ermolaev,
• Izmailov, Kantemirov, Karamazov, Karamzin, Kireevsky, Korsakov, Kochubey, Kropotkin, Kurakin, Kurbatov,
• Milyukov, Michurin,
• Rachmaninov,
• Saltykov, Stroganov,
• Tagantsev, Talyzin, Taneyev, Tatishchev, Timashev, Timiryazev, Tretyakov, Turgenev, Turchaninov, Tyutchev,
• Uvarov, Urusov, Ushakov,
• Khanykov,
• Chaadaev,
• Shakhovskoy, Sheremetiev, Shishkov,
• Yusupov.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. A scrupulous analysis of noble genealogies suggests that

• 30% of nobles have Turkic origin(mostly these are the descendants of the steppe people who fled from the persecution of Khan Uzbek),
• 40% is accounted for Old Slavic clans and further
• 30% have western origin- from Lithuanians, Poles, Germans, Swedes, etc.

But that happened in later centuries...

Christian refugees from the Golden Horde formed a whole social stratum - single-palace nobles, who were settled in the southeastern corner of the principality of Moscow and who took an active part in the defense of Moscow's borders.

Where did the Slavic people come from? There are quite a few theories about this. In this article we will try to understand what ethnogenesis is. We will find out what hypotheses about the origin of the Eastern Slavs exist.

What is ethnogenesis?

Peoples did not arise in one moment. Different people united in small groups, which gradually expanded. Small communities grew into entire tribes. In their life together, they had their own foundations, habits, rules and traditions that distinguish them from other groups.

What is ethnogenesis? This is the initial stage in the formation of peoples. The process of transition from individuals to a group with the same way of life, one culture. The formation of an ethnos, that is, a people, occurred due to various reasons and factors.

Each nation has a different history of origin. The emergence and formation of a nationality, a nation can be influenced by the geographical environment, religion, neighboring groups of people. Settlers and invaders also contribute to the development of the people. Some peoples, for example, Germans, Americans, Swiss, arose as a result of an external challenge.

Slavs

In cultural and ethnological terms, a people is a community of people, which is united by certain characteristics. Previously, they were blood kinship, but over time, language, religion, historical past, traditions and culture, and territory began to be considered such signs.

About 70 peoples live in Europe, some of which belong to the Slavs. They represent the largest settlements in Central, Southern, Eastern Europe, the Far East and the Asian part of Russia. Worldwide, their number is approximately 350 million people.

There are eastern, southern and western branches of the Slavs. Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians are classified as Eastern Slavs because of the closer cultural and linguistic connection. According to some researchers, the ancestors of these peoples were the main population of the Old Russian state in the Middle Ages, representing one nationality.

Ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs

Under the name of the Wends, the Slavs appear in various written sources as early as the 1st millennium BC. Prior to this, there were several pre-Slavic ethnic cultures (for example, Przeworsk), which, most likely, gave rise to these peoples. However, the problem of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs still remains open. And now the opinions of scientists on this matter differ.

It is believed that the Slavs belong to the Indo-European language family, which includes many other peoples. And they come from the central and eastern regions of Europe. According to various hypotheses, this is the territory between the Oder and the Vistula, the Middle Danube, the Pripyat Polissya, etc.

It is assumed that they lived in small tribes, after the first millennium they began to unite into larger formations - tribal unions. Gradually, they were divided into western and eastern branches, and over time, a southern branch appeared. Eastern Slavs are often called Ants. They lived next to the tribes of Avars, Goths, Khazars, Pechenegs, Polovtsy.

All these tribes had a significant impact on the ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs. Between them often there were wars, raids. The Khazars even managed to impose tribute on the Slavs. Researchers do not exclude the possibility that modern East Slavic peoples may be descendants of joint marriages between Slavs and East European tribes.

Theories of the origin of the Eastern Slavs

There are various hypotheses about the origin and distribution of the Slavic tribes. Thus, the autochthonous theory of ethnogenesis reports that the Slavs did not come from other territories, but arose in the valleys of the Dnieper and Dniester.

According to the migration theory, during the III-VII centuries they settled in the territory between the Dnieper and the Dniester, in the eastern valleys of the Dnieper. Later, some of them spread to the territories of southern Ukraine, the Southern Bug and modern Moldova. The other part, faced with the Varangians, stopped in the north-west of Russia and founded Veliky Novgorod, also occupied the territory of Beloozero and the Tver region.

There is also a mixed theory that suggests that migration among the Slavs took place. But not everyone moved, some remained on the territory of their historical homeland, continuing their usual way of life.

Conclusion

What is ethnogenesis? This is the process of the birth and formation of the people. Although the term includes its further development. The study of ethnogenesis includes the study of the linguistic, cultural, historical characteristics of a particular people, its way of life, geographical location and movement throughout its existence.

The origin of the Eastern Slavs so far leaves more questions than answers. There are many theories, historical and semi-legendary documents about the formation, but there is no consensus in scientific circles.

Russia took shape and developed as a multinational power. Various peoples lived on its territory, which differed from each other in language, way of life, religion, cultural traditions and the level of socio-economic development.

Ethnos - (translated from Greek) tribe, people.

Ethnogenesis - (translated from Greek) the origin of peoples.

Ethnonym - (translated from Greek) the name of peoples.

Nation - (from Latin - a tribe of peoples) - a historical community of people that develops in the process of forming communities, their territorial, economic ties, literary language, some features of culture and character. Each nation exists in historical time, is formed in a certain territory, can change the area (area) of its distribution or even disappear. A number of peoples known from historical sources (Scythians, Sarmatians, Goths, Azars, Khazars, etc.), who lived in the territories that are now part of Russia and the CIS, have disappeared, dissolved in other ethnic groups. Ethnic groups do not disappear without a trace, they are transformed into other ethnic groups. So, on the basis of the East Slavic ethnic community, the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnic groups were formed. Modern science has abandoned the ideas that define the nation as something permanent. Previously, Soviet historiography was progress concept . According to it, nations were formed only in the conditions of a bourgeois society, which was preceded by tribes, then tribal unions, feudal peoples, nations, and ultimately a single humanity with the victory of communism. Now most scientists have abandoned this theory. Albert Toynbee's Theory of Civilizations. According to it, in each geographical region (forest, steppe, coast, etc.), a certain system of relationships between people develops. Therefore, each civilization has its own special way of development, determined by the system of relationships between people and their natural environment. According to Toynbee, civilization is born, develops and dies (Egypt, Hellas, etc.). The same can be said about ethnic communities. In modern domestic science, a similar approach to solving the problem of the emergence and disappearance of peoples was proposed by L.N. Gumilyov - the theory of ethnic groups . According to him, the main feature of an ethnic group is a certain stereotype of behavior, emerging as a means of adapting large groups of people to a change in the environment. This approach assumes that ethnic groups are also born, develop and disappear, giving rise to the emergence of new ethnic groups. So, the problem of the emergence of ethnic groups is the problem of the emergence of its distinctive features.

In the XIX-XX centuries. in the works of scientists and publicists, both in Russia and in Europe, concepts began to appear, designed to prove the heterogeneity of the Russian ethnos. Nowadays, there are much more adherents of this idea. Increasingly, articles by various authors appear in the press, who develop this concept with enviable constancy, without bothering with scientific evidence.

The importance of a comprehensive analysis of this problem is obvious. While the idea of ​​the ethno-historical heterogeneity of Russians took on a pronounced political coloring, it became necessary to cite a number of facts designed to shed light on this “mystery”. Moreover, in our time there are already quite monstrous theories. One writer, for example, claims that not a single Russian can say for sure where his ancestors were on the Kulikovo field - either in the Russian army, or under the bunchuks of Mamai.

A certain difficulty of this work lies in the fact that a logically built chain of scientific facts, which contradicts the concept of heterogeneity, often meets with complete misunderstanding, and sometimes even aggressiveness of a number of people, especially those who adhere to established stereotypes of thinking.

It was from this environment that voices began to be heard calling for the general avoidance of talking about the Russian ethnos, in connection with its alleged absence. The authors of this circle in a number of articles put forward the thesis that the geographical space from the Baltic and the Carpathians to the Pacific Ocean is occupied not by the Russian people, but by population groups that are not genetically related to each other, but only accidentally united by the Russian language. This heterogeneous population has been given the “scientific” term “Russian-speakers”.

Of course, it would be possible not to react to such stupidities of authors who did not receive proper education, if their ideas did not occupy a certain place in the sequence of political steps aimed at the destruction of Russia as a single state.

The synchronicity of the appearance of the ideas of the dismemberment of the Russian state and ethnic heterogeneity of the Russian is manifested for the third time in a century. The previous two times the exaggeration of such ideas in the European press preceded the world wars. What can we expect from the third time? What new evidence is presented by our European opponents and their Russian admirers in favor of the dismemberment of Russia? Compared to the beginning of the century, nothing new and clever is heard.

Let us consider in more detail a number of issues that affect the main problems of the ethnic history of the Russian people.

Slavic ethnogenesis

First of all, we must clearly grasp an indisputable historical fact: for the last millennium of human history, the plain from the Carpathians to the Urals, from the White Sea to the Black Sea has been occupied by the Russian ethnos, Orthodox in religion, Slavic in language and firmly welded together by a single historical memory and ethnic history. Inexorable facts testify that the difference between the three branches of the Russian people (Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians), according to linguistics and anthropology, is less, for example, than the differences between the Germans living in Bavaria and the Germans living in Hamburg.

The unity of the Eastern Slavs is recorded in written sources starting from the 11th century. In The Tale of Bygone Years, St. Nestor the chronicler writes: “They speak Slavonic in Russia: the Polans, the Drevlyans, the Novgorodians, the Polochans, the Dregovichi, the Severians, the Buzhans.” St. Nestor reflected not just linguistic unity, but also the awareness of this unity by the Slavs.

Next, St. Nestor gives data, from the point of view of anthropology, cultural and physical, which will be given below: “... And here are other peoples who pay tribute to Russia: Chud, Merya, All, Muroma, Cheremis, Mordvins, Perm, Pechera, Yam, Lithuania , blinked, kors, steam, divas, these speak their own languages, they are the offspring of Japheth, living in the northern countries. This passage is interesting not only because it delineates the borders of Russia at the end of the 11th century, or because for the first time in history a geopolitical definition of Russia was given as the “North”, which the offspring of Japheth received as inheritance. The fact is that such a geopolitical orientation of Russia existed in scientific works, in political treatises and fiction until the 20th century, when it was replaced by “East”. The substitution did not happen by chance, and it went in parallel with the introduction of ideas about the “Tatar” or “Asian” nature of Russia, about the racial heterogeneity of Russians and their state and civilizational failure. For their own purposes, the orientation "Russia-East" was adopted by the Russian Eurasians in the 20-30s of our century.

However, in these lines of the chronicle, we are also interested in something else. St. Nestor defines all non-Slavic peoples who pay tribute to Russia as the offspring of Japheth. According to Biblical historiosophy, the descendants of the youngest son Noah are all European peoples, including the Slavs. Here we see not just a tribute to the Biblical tradition, but also the fact that, in addition to linguistic differences, St. Nestor did not see a sharp line between the Slavs, the Bolts and the Finns. It can be assumed that if the differences in external features of these ethnic groups were obvious, St. Nestor would certainly have noted this fact.

Of course, this is only an assumption, which, however, has some confirmation on the basis of anthropological data.

The Russian and later Soviet school of anthropology, being the world's leading one, provides very interesting material on the racial type of the Slavs and their neighbors. The framework of this work is not sufficient for a broader anthropological analysis, so we will limit ourselves to data from the works of our most famous anthropologists with a worldwide reputation: A.P. Bogdanov, A.A. Bashmakov, V.P. Alekseev, G.V. Lebedinskaya.

In his doctoral dissertation on the paleoanthropology of the Slavs, as well as in a number of other studies, A.P. Bogdanov established the fact of the cardinal significance of differences in the shape of the skull between the long-headed kurgan population of ancient Russia and, basically, the round-headed modern representatives of the Russian people (A.P. Bogdanov , 1879). In the last work, which sums up all the research of the scientist, A.P. Bogdanov came to the conclusion about the brachycephalization of the modern population under the influence of the development of civilization (Vodapou, 1892). Similar processes were observed not only in Russia, but also in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Switzerland. This conclusion of the Russian anthropologist, extremely advanced for its time, later received numerous confirmations on a variety of materials and firmly entered the golden fund of achievements of Russian anthropology.

We can obtain very important information for us in the articles of I.A. Ilyin, the great Russian thinker of our century, where he cites the data of the famous Russian anthropologist of the first half of the 20th century, Professor A.A. Bashmakov, who summarizes the process of racial education on the territory of all of Russia as organic "uniformity in difference".

A.A. Bashmakov writes: “This is the formula. The Russian people ... is currently a kind of homogeneity, clearly expressed in the cranial data and very limited in the scope of deviations from the central and middle type of the race they represent. Contrary to what everyone imagines, Russian homogeneity is the most established and most pronounced in all of Europe!”

American anthropologists have calculated that the variation in the structure of the skull in the Russian population does not exceed 5 points per hundred, while the French population varies within 9 points, declared racially pure by the ideologists of National Socialism, the Germans have about 7 anthropological types, and the Italians - 14.

Professor I. Ilyin cites in one of his articles the data of A. A. Bashmakov that "the average cranial type of a purely Russian population occupies almost the middle between the non-Russified peoples of the Empire." I.A. Ilyin also writes that they are talking in vain about the “Tatarization” of the Russian people. “In fact, the opposite happened in history, that is, the Russification of foreign peoples: for over the centuries, foreigners “kidnapped” Russian women who bore them semi-Russian children, and Russians, strictly adhering to national proximity, did not take wives from foreign tribes (foreign faith foreign language! foreign temper!); frightened by the Tatar yoke, they kept to their own and thus observed their organic-central thoroughbreds. This whole age-old process created in the Russian type a point of concentration of all the creative forces inherent in the peoples of its territory” (see the work of A.A. Bashmakov, published in French in 1937 in Paris “Fifty centuries of ethnic evolution around the Black Sea”). Apparently, the process of deporting a large number of the Russian population to Kazan became the decisive factor in the current Caucasoid nature of the Volga Tatars, along, of course, with the Finno-Ugric substratum.

It is known that the population of the Volga Bulgaria in the Middle Ages, before the Tatar defeat, was mainly Caucasoid with a slight Mongoloid admixture. The word "Tatars" finally became the self-name of the Volga Tatars only at the beginning of our century. Until the end of the last century, they “recommended” themselves as Bulgarians (Bulgars). The original bearers of the ethnonym “Tatars” lived in Eastern Mongolia and had nothing in common with those who now live in Russia. They spoke the ancient Mongolian language and had a characteristic Mongoloid appearance.

The Tatar-Mongol invasion was of great importance for the ethnic history of the tribes of Eastern Europe. But in relation to the Russian people, the invasion had a fundamentally different character of consequences in comparison with the Finno-Ugric tribes of the Volga region.

Karamzin writes: “...despite the humiliation of slavery, we felt our civil superiority in relation to the nomadic people. The consequence was that the Russians emerged from the yoke with a more European than Asian character. Europe did not recognize us: but for the fact that it has changed in these 250 years, and we have remained as we were. Her travelers of the XIII century did not even find any difference in the clothes of ours and Western peoples: the same, no doubt, could be said in the reasoning of other customs. Historian A. Sakharov continues this idea: “Neither in legislation, nor in social thought, nor in literature, nor in painting can one notice anything that would be borrowed from the Mongol-Tatars. The surest indicator in this regard is the assessment of the Mongol-Tatar invasion and yoke by the people themselves. Everything that we know about the oral folk art of the 14th-15th centuries clearly and categorically testifies to the sharply negative assessment given by the people to the Mongol-Tatar invasion and yoke. Therefore, it can be said with confidence that the Turkic-Slavic ethnic and cultural symbiosis, so dear to Eurasians of all degrees and initiations, simply did not exist. This is the fruit of unscrupulous fantasies or, at best, delusions.

These delusions were shared in Russia mainly by homegrown social democrats. For example, even N. Chernyshevsky wrote about the Russian folk soul: “An extremely large amount of Asian and Byzantine entered into it, so that the folk spirit was completely exhausted under the yoke of alien influences ... A beautiful Slavic organization, a pretty Slavic face were distorted, in accordance with Eastern concepts of beauty, so that a Russian man and a Russian woman, who could follow the requirements of the then good manners, gave themselves a completely Asian appearance and a completely Mongol disgrace.

In fairness, we note that, unlike the Eurasians, Chernyshevsky has a sharply negative attitude towards the eastern elements and sings of the pure Slavic type. On the other hand, illiteracy and illegibility in terms is shocking. It is absolutely impossible to put two cultural worlds Asian and Byzantine in one row. Byzantium nourished with its life-giving juices not only Russia, but also the European Renaissance.

Now let's turn to the works of modern anthropologists V.P. Alekseev and G.V. Lebedinskaya.

V.P. Alekseev’s research on the ethnic history of the Eastern Slavs is especially interesting. When considering the craniological type of the Russian series, V.P. Alekseev emphasized the exceptional morphological similarity, which manifested itself when comparing all the materials at his disposal.

“Comparative monotony,” writes V.P. Alekseev, speaking of the geographical setting of the area of ​​the Russian people, is widespread in the vast territory of a single language, although it breaks up into dialects, but is closely related and understandable throughout the territory of Russian settlement. To this must be added the absence of social isolation within groups of the Russian population. All these facts led to the fact that the combination of craniological features characteristic of the Russian population spread over a vast territory from Arkhangelsk to Kursk and from Smolensk to Vologda and Penza.

Here we are talking, of course, about the Great Russian population of European Russia, which is a very stable over time and homogeneous genetic core of the Russian ethnos. Let's return to the fact that Russians have 5 main anthropological types, taking into account Belarusians and Little Russians. This testifies to even greater homogeneity of the Great Russian branch of the Russian people.

Further, V.P. Alekseev in his work “Craniology of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus in connection with the problems of their origin” (Moscow, 1967), actually passes judgment on untenable attempts to present the Russian people as a random combination of ethnic groups, not united by anything but language . In particular, V.P. Alekseev writes that the differences between groups of Russians do not depend on the distance between them: the differences between territorially close series are no less than between remote ones.

Obviously, in these circumstances, variability from random causes plays a special role. A striking fact is the relative preservation in the Russian environment of the anthropological type of the Eastern Slavs of the early Middle Ages. This fact allows us to restore continuity in the anthropological type of Russians with specific East Slavic tribes. For example, when comparing Belarusians with the medieval craniological series of Radimichi and Dregovichi, it is permissible to speak of the continuity of the anthropological type. For the Little Russian population, the fact of the genetic continuity of the Drevlyans and the modern population of Ukraine is established. The Great Russians were formed on the basis of the Slavs, Krivichi and Vyatichi, including in their composition in the west the Radmichi, and in the south - the northerners.

For a long time, scientists believed that the Finno-Ugric tribes Vesi, Mori and Muroms also entered the composition of the Great Russians. In this case, it would seem that the flat-faced and flat-nosed type, which is associated mainly with the Finnish population, should have been preserved and manifested in the Great Russians. However, modern Russians are closer even to the hypothetical type that was characteristic of the ancestors of the Eastern Slavs before the collision with the Finnish substratum.

It is also important that the modern craniological series of the Eastern Slavs are closer to the West Slavic and South Slavic groups than even the medieval East Slavic series available to anthropologists. Most of all, this similarity is characteristic of the Great Russians. The facts convincingly testify to the similarity of all Slavic peoples, not only in language, but also in anthropological type.

The ethnic history of the Russian people, the Slavs, is closely connected with the problem of the ancestral home of the peoples-bearers of the Indo-European languages, which we will further call Aryan, as was customary in the scientific world of the 19th - early 20th centuries. This term is more convenient, and does not violate the continuity of scientific thought.

Now scientists are developing questions of the Aryan ancestral home with a wide involvement of historical, archaeological, linguistic, anthropological and other materials. A large role is assigned to the geography and history of the evolution of the earth's climate.

At the moment, there are three main versions of the geographical localization of the ancestral home of the Aryan peoples. Some scientists consider Central Europe to be the ancestral home, some - the Northern Black Sea region. The most interesting is the hypothesis of the polar ancestral home of the Aryans. This idea has found a large number of adherents in the scientific world. Expressed for the first time by the Indian scientist B. G. Tilak (1856-1920), it finds a large number of direct and indirect scientific confirmations today.

BG Tilak was not the first to point to the Arctic as the ancestral home of mankind. But his merit is that he carried out a deep analysis of the Rigveda, the sacred and ancient book of the Aryans, and Indian epic poems - primarily the Mahabharata. Being the direct bearer of the Tradition (B.G. Tilak was a Brahmin), the scientist found in the Vedas and the epic a large number of facts pointing to the Arctic as the ancestral home of the Aryan tribes.

The topic of the Arctic ancestral home is not touched upon here by chance. It is closely connected with the problem of the ethnic history of not only the Slavs, but also their closest neighbors in the north of the Finno-Ugric peoples.

And in this regard, the facts established by the Soviet anthropologist VV Bunak are very important. In his article “The Origin of the Russian People According to Anthropological Data,” he writes in particular:

“In addition, it turned out that not a single Russian group fully reproduces the complex of features characteristic of the central variants of the Baltic, Ural or Neo-Pontic racial types. This fact and many others led to the conclusion that the basis of Russian anthropological variants and some pre-Slavic (?) is one common anthropological layer, very ancient, dating back to the early Neolithic and Mesolithic times. The original general type, called the ancient Eastern European, clearly appears in the summary characteristics of modern groups of the Russian population. In racial and taxonomic terms, the Eastern European type, which was not identified in previous works, is included in the range of varieties of the European group as a special race. These facts are the most important evidence that the Slavic Russians are the oldest, original inhabitants of the Russian Plain. The question of ancient migrations disappears.

Surprising is the fact that the most ancient special racial type has been preserved, which is not correlated either with the racial type of the Baltic peoples, or with the Finno-Ugric peoples of the Cis-Urals. Consequently, the question of racial mutations of Russians also disappears as anti-scientific.

But most importantly, anthropological science determines the racial type of the ancient Aryan ancestral home according to Tilak, which the Aryans brought to India and Iran, and the tribes of the battle ax culture to Western Europe. Everywhere this type underwent changes and remained pure in the ancient Aryan ancestral home on the Russian Plain from the White to the Black Seas. The fact of the existence of an ancient Eastern European race highlights the ethnogenetic history of the Finns in a new way.

Slavs and Finno-Ugric

It must be taken into account that anthropology as a science until the middle of the 20th century was not seriously involved in recreating the true ethnic history of Russians. Even the pillars of Russian historical thought had a vague idea on this issue. Most of them paid tribute to the then fashionable theory about the Finnish substratum as one of the components of the Great Russian nationality.

For example, V. Klyuchevsky believed that the meeting of Russia and Chud was peaceful. Indeed, neither in written monuments nor in the folk traditions of the Great Russians is there any mention of the struggle against the Finnish natives. Of course, the nature of the Finns also contributed to this. In European historiography, the Finns are marked by common characteristic features - peacefulness, timidity, even downtroddenness. The Russians, having met the Finns, immediately felt their superiority over them and called them by a common collective name: Chud, which means wonderful. Both Estonians and Zyryans were called Chud. However, there was, of course, no absolutely peaceful picture of the relationship. The Finns did not at all seek to convert to Orthodoxy. The Komi-Zyryans and Permians did not show much zeal for a change of faith even in the 14th century. Saint Stephon of Perm had to put a lot of effort into their conversion. The main mass was in the "disgrace".

Finns-hunters were by no means settled tribes. The cities of Rostov, Murom and Beloozero were built by the Slavs, not by Finnish hunters and fishermen. The bulk of the Finns, of course, migrated to the northeast. Since the Finnish population was small, those who remained disappeared into the Russian sea without a trace.

It is important to note that conflicts with the Finns still took place on religious grounds. According to the life of St. Leonty of Rostov, all Rostov pagans stubbornly fought against Christian preachers. Rostov Rus, which revered Veles, sided with the Meryans. A legend has been preserved, recorded in the 17th century, that the pagans Meryans and Rus of the Rostov region, fleeing “from Russian baptism”, moved to the borders of the Bulgarian kingdom on the Volga to the kindred measure Cheremis. Of course, this was not a purely tribal struggle between Russia and Chud, but a religious one. But the carriers of the antagonistic spiritual constants of Christianity and paganism were Rus and Finns. Moreover, part of the pagan Slavs left with the Finns to the east. So, in the XI century, part of the Vyatichi left the Oka for Vyatka, resisting Christianization.

Thus, the issue of the merging of the Finns and Slavs should be decided on a different plane, namely, the issue of the Slavic component of the Finns of Eastern Europe should be considered. The original Finnish features: high cheekbones, a swarthy complexion, a wide nose and dark hair are not so common among Finno-Finns due to Slavic influence - light-colored types predominate.

The Russian people did not have racial fanaticism, and they willingly agreed to mixed marriages. But the phenomenon of Slavism is that from mixed marriages, children very often remain in the bosom of small peoples. Russians look with surprising calmness at the fact that their children are becoming Zyryans, Mordovians, Permians in terms of upbringing and culture - the main thing is that they be Orthodox. This largely explains the fact that the Slavic racial type was preserved by the Great Russians in its original purity, and, at the same time, the racial type of the surrounding Russian neighbors took on the Slavic component.

After the adoption of Orthodoxy, all Finno-Ugric peoples became full participants in the construction of the Russian state. But the most interesting thing is that even the Tatar settlements of the Ryazan, Kostroma, Moscow provinces until the 20th century retained their national identity, culture and even Islam.

However, it is important to say that, while getting along with the Tatars, the Russian people did not seek to merge with them ethnically. And if at the elite level, representatives of local elites entered the environment of the nobility and eventually merged with the purely Russian nobility, then various barriers remained in the lower ranks of the people that did not allow them to merge with those of other faiths.

If now, in the light of new data from anthropology, linguistics, and history, these processes are becoming clear, then in the last century they caused bewilderment. On the one hand, it was generally accepted to consider the Great Russians of the provinces of Moscow, Vladimir, Yaroslavl and Kostroma indisputably the best representatives of the North Slavic type in its original purity. On the other hand, they did not know what to do with the fact that Merya and Murom lived on the lands of these provinces. The absence of these tribes in these territories since the 12th century has been puzzling.

There were two possible solutions to the problem. First: the new Russia, settling among the native Chud, borrowed a lot from the ethnic features and life of the Finns. The second: the Chud, gradually becoming Russian, with all its mass, with all the anthropological features, language and beliefs, was part of the Russians. The difficulty, however, was that it was not possible to isolate the anthropological features of the Finns from the obviously pure Russians. Traces of language and beliefs were not found. This was a little embarrassing for many, and in the books they continued to draw the Great Russian as a kind of Slavic-Mongolian mestizo.

The Prussian official of the 19th century, Baron Haxthausen, considered only Little Russians to be pure Slavs. In particular, according to his theory, pure peoples could never in history lead great empires. That is why the “pure” Little Russians gave way to the “unclean” Great Russians.

The statement about “impure Great Russians” and the conviction that pure ethnic groups are incapable of building empires are also absurd. History tells a different story. Both the Greeks and the Romans began their building of great empires, being unmixed peoples. It was mixing with foreigners that was the main reason for the death of both the empire of Alexander and the proud imperial Rome. Ultimately, the polyethnicity of Byzantium, the Romans, weakened the empire of Christian emperors.

The Russians remain a fairly pure and homogeneous tribe. And in the last century, people have already begun to talk about it. The same Gaksthausen was surprised that a significant Finnish Zyryan tribe lives without any embarrassment next to the Russians and is engaged in their age-old trade - hunting. Other Finnish tribes, writes the Prussian baron, gradually died out, like many American Indian tribes. Some, having adopted Orthodoxy, merged with the Russians.

It is difficult to agree with Gaksthausen when he writes about the extinction of the Finns, like the American Indians. For a millennium, not so many tribes have disappeared from the map of Eastern Europe. In the places of compact residence of the Russian tribe, we will not find only measure and muroma.

For a long time in the scientific world, the process of mixing of Slavs and Finno-Ugric peoples in the forest belt of Eastern Europe was recognized as a firmly established fact. There is no doubt that there were certain contacts between the Slavs and the Finno-Ugric peoples, but they no longer played a significant role in the racial development of the Russians.

To consider the anthropological type of the Finns, we have at our disposal facts of a historical and archaeological nature.

The problem of the Finno-Ugric tribes is that the anthropological type of the Baltic Finns and Finno-Ugric Trans-Urals is very different. As noted above, in the territory of the Eastern. In Europe, the Slavs lived next to the Izhora, the whole, Muroma and Merya. In the textbooks of national history, they paint a picture of the inclusion of these peoples in the political orbit of the Russian state and their rapid dissolution in the Slavic environment.

We repeat that it is difficult to confirm this fact anthropologically. Of course, there is material indicating that there were contacts, but they were very insignificant. If the process described in the textbooks of the history of Russia had taken place, then we would have been talking about the Vesi and the Izhora as about the disappeared peoples who merged with the Slavs. However, the whole, and the Izhora, and the Karelians continue to live among the Great Russians, without merging with them over the thousand-year history of Russian statehood.

In this regard, an indicative example is that the Karelians have been living in the center of Russia, in the Tver region, for more than two hundred years, and have still retained their ethnic and cultural identity, without merging with the Great Russians. But Eastern Europe is the center of the formation of the Great Russian nationality, and the processes of assimilation should, according to the logic of things, take place here with particular intensity.

The most striking thing is the fact that both Karelians and Vepsians are Orthodox Christians, as well as the use of the Russian language in everyday life, along with their native language. It would seem that there were no major barriers to complete assimilation. If we take into account the fact of the modern secularization of society, the withering away of old traditions and social differences, then today there are even fewer of them. Nevertheless, we are more likely to observe a revival of national self-consciousness among the Karelians, Izhors and Vepsians.

The situation is more complicated with the other two Finno-Ugric tribes - Meryu and Muroma. Since the end of the 11th century, the names of these tribes have disappeared from Russian chronicles. Scientists in pre-revolutionary Russia, and then in the USSR, almost unanimously came to the conclusion about the complete dissolution of Mary and Muroma in the Slavic environment. Recent archaeological discoveries do not allow drawing such categorical conclusions.

In 1071, in the Suzdal land in Rostov, on the Volga, Sheksna, Beloozero, an uprising broke out, which had a bright anti-Christian orientation. The uprising was very harshly suppressed by the governor Dn Vyshatich. The pagan Meryans played the main role in raising the uprising. It was on them that the main blow was dealt. From this moment, it is possible to trace the outflow of the Finno-Ugric population to the east, and it is from this moment that Merya disappears from the field of view of Russian chronicles. This is confirmed by the legend of the XVII century. Obviously, Merya was included in the Mari, and Muroma played an important role in the ethnogenesis of the Mordovians.

It is important to note that there were simply no necessary prerequisites for the process of complete assimilation of small groups of the Finno-Ugric population in Eastern Europe. The sparse population of a vast area, the fundamental difference in the management of Slavic farmers and Finnish forest hunters, religious and ethnic heterogeneity, and a host of other, including social, obstacles prevented the process of mass mixing. The Russians, moreover, during their more than a thousand years of state history have proved their amazing coexistence without encroaching on the historical existence of other peoples. How many peoples and nationalities the Russian Empire included, so much it brought to our days. The case in the history of the formation and development of empires is unique. The Roman, Byzantine, German and British empires ended the historical life of a huge number of peoples.

The importance of the fact that in the construction of the Russian state from the very beginning of its inception were full-fledged subjects and all, and Karelians, and Chud.

Thus, the fate of the Russian state is not only the fate of the Slavs, but also the allied and equal Finnish peoples.

In this regard, it is necessary to highlight the issues of the ethnic history of the Finns. Moreover, this problem contains interesting evidence that can become a key in further research related to the search for the ancestral home of the Aryans.

Let us return to the work of the anthropologist V.P. Alekseev. Here is what he writes: “The complex of features characteristic of the Baltic Finns is most clearly represented in the composition of Estonians and Finns proper. These are, of course, Caucasoid peoples, the Mongoloid admixture in which is an insignificant percentage. Apparently, the same complex of craniological features is also predominant among other Baltic-Finnish peoples: the Izhors and Karelians.

The differences of the Lopar series from all those listed are in a high cranial index, a somewhat lower and noticeably wider face. In other respects, the Lappish skulls differ little from the Estonian and Finnish ones.”

The fact is that the mixture of the ancient representatives of the northern branch of the Caucasians with some low-faced Mongoloids, distinguished by their short stature and dark pigmentation, became the ethnic basis of the modern Saami. Considering other Finnish tribes neighboring the Slavs, we must note the sharp Caucasoid expression of the Izhors.

Many anthropological features make it possible to exclude the Mordovians from among the representatives of the Subural type and consider it, like the Russians of the eastern regions of the European part of Russia, as a population whose anthropological features have developed on the basis of Caucasoid variants of the transition zone between northern and southern Caucasoids.

It is very important to note the fact that the Mordovians retained the features of the Caucasoid race, being in the zone of constant contacts with the Turkic tribes and being a buffer between Russia and the Steppe.

Speaking about the northern part of European Russia, we must mention another Finnish people: the Komi-Zyryans.

In his monograph, the scientist V.N.Belitser (1958) gave examples of the powerful influence of Russian culture on the culture and life of the Komi, and even their complete Russification. It is very likely that during the colonization of the European North, the descendants of the Slovenes of Novgorod partially dissolved in the mass of the Komi-Zyryans, which later facilitated their Russification. Nevertheless, the Komi still have significant Mongoloid features. At least among modern Permian Finno-Finns, the Mongoloid admixture is more distinct than among the Baltic Finns.

Modern anthropological studies have shown that the Russian population of a number of regions of Perm is not “undersized Permians”, but has above average height, mesocephalic, narrow faces, light brown hair, soft, straight and wavy, etc., that is, they retain the Northern European type, a variant which in the European North is the White Sea type of Pomors.

Based on the materials of the Karelian burial grounds, it turned out that the formation of the Karelians, as follows from the odontological analysis, occurred on the basis of not one, but two odontological types: the northern graceful and the more ancient - the northern European relic, which is ethnically associated with the Saami. According to the most general characteristic, the Karelians belong to the Caucasoid peoples, whose Mongoloid admixture is an insignificant percentage.

Finishing the anthropological review of the Finno-Ugric peoples of European Russia, let's look at the encyclopedic dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron, which says the following:

“The Finns of the middle Volga region (Mordovians, Cheremis) merge in their anthropological features with the neighboring Great Russians.

The Tatars of the middle Volga region, who now differ sharply in their religion (Mohammedanism), differ much less from the Russians in their type, despite the element of Mongoloism they have adopted; in the mass they are more like Tatarized Finns, which is even more true about the Chuvash, who even mastered the Tatar language.

The self-name of the Tatars before the beginning of our century has already been written above, which once again confirms the idea of ​​the Finnish substratum of the Volga Turks.

The above anthropological features of the Finns allow scientists to admit the possibility of a single anthropological prototype for the Slavs, Balts and Baltic Finns, which existed in Eastern Europe and had pronounced Caucasoid features.

In the collection Anthropological Types of the Ancient Population on the Territory of the USSR (1988), co-authored by the famous anthropologist G.V. Lebedinskaya, an ancient Caucasoid type is considered, sharply dolicocranial with a medium-wide, high, strongly profiled face and protruding nose. This type was distributed over a vast territory from the Dnieper to the Rhine in the VIII-V millennium BC. Apparently, this anthropological type underlies the ethnic history of the Germans, Bolts, Slavs and Baltic Finns.

Summing up all of the above, it is necessary to once again note the indisputable fact of the racial unity of the Russian people. At the same time, we should also note that racial contacts with Finno-Ugric peoples on the periphery of Russian settlement, especially in the Urals, took place, but this did not affect the genetic core of the Russian people, which has a stable gene pool.

G.L. Khit in his work “Dermatoglyphics of the Peoples of the USSR” (M.: Nauka, 1983) comes to the conclusion based on a thorough analysis of fingerprint patterns: Byelorussians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Vepsians, Komi and Mordovians”.

Similar conclusions were reached by scientists in Germany in the 1930s. According to German data, a dermatoglyphic complex with a pronounced Nordic type can be traced not only among Norwegians, Englishmen and Germans, but also among Russians. The party elite of the Third Reich did not want to reckon with scientists and understand that on the Eastern Front the Germans would be opposed not by the Huns, but by the Nordic brothers.

Let us add that in his study G.L. Khit also notes a huge difference in the dermatoglyphic material of the Russians, on the one hand, and the Kazan Tatars, Maris and Chuvashs, on the other. Consequently, there can be no question of any miscegenation of Russians if, having freed ourselves from international and liberal myths, one takes a firm scientific position in anthropological science.

Anthropology and politics

After getting acquainted with such an extensive factual material, the question quite rightly arises, how could the legend about the Mongoloid and “Asiatic” nature of the Russian ethnos appear, what realities of the historical process justified it, where are its roots?

It must be admitted that the origins of this legend are mainly political - this myth served exclusively the unseemly political goals of Russia's historical enemies.

The modern reader may wonder why anthropological and ethnographic knowledge is given such special attention in the interpretation of historical processes and in political life. Moreover, many sincerely believe that the beginning of this approach to politics and history was laid in the 30s of our century in Nazi Germany. It is precisely with this that the obvious prejudice of not only ordinary people, but also many scientists towards anthropological science is connected.

In fact, already in the 19th century, anthropology became a very highly politicized science. The works of the Frenchman A. de Gobineau had a great influence on European thought in the 19th century, in which he proved the inequality of human races on the basis of anthropological science. A. de Gobineau went down in history as the father of racist ideology. However, this did not in the least compromise anthropology, either in its purely scientific aspect or in its political rethinking.

In the works of the Slavophile N.Ya. Danilevsky, special attention is paid to the anthropology of the Western and Eastern Slavs in the light of the prospect of the transition of the center of world culture from Western Europe to the Slavic world. The first president of independent Czechoslovakia T. G. Masaryk also paid tribute to anthropology in its political aspect. In one of the conversations with K. Chapek, he said the following: “In the works of German anthropologists, I find measurements of the skull, according to which we (the Czechs - author) are among the first peoples: we are talented, what is true is true.” It should be especially noted that in those years such an approach did not cause negative emotions.

The pinnacle of the politicization of anthropology is the activity of the “scientific” institutions of the Third Reich. Anthropology was placed in the hands of delusional ideas about the racial superiority of the Germans. The unthinkable human sacrifices made on the black altar of Nazism made anthropology a sinister science in the eyes of many people. Her rehabilitation is a matter for the future. But anthropology objectively cannot be blamed for the crimes of the Nazis. Moreover, history and modernity show us examples when masses of people were destroyed even without the involvement of anthropological knowledge, but simply in the name of “bright ideals”: ​​building communism in a single country, creating a Jewish state on the lands of the Arabs, or in the name of a “new world order” , where no place is reserved for independent Serbia and Iraq.

Let us return to the problem of the anthropological history of the Russian people and the emergence in the West of the conviction of the “Asianism” and racial inferiority of the population of the Russian Empire, the danger of Asian hordes for Western civilization.

The beginning of this legend was laid by “enlighteners from the West”, who, from the beginning of the 18th century, got involved in the field of young Russian secular science. It is easy to see that thoughts about racial heterogeneity, Mongoloidity and, as a consequence of the first two signs, inferiority - social and political, appear simultaneously with the "Norman" theory of the origin of the Russian state. Both ideas were intended to complement one another. Due to the pronounced groundlessness of both, their supporters made a lot of efforts so that both legends were perceived in the scientific world as scientific axioms.

The success of such efforts is evident. Starting from the middle of the 18th century, any European traveler used the “Tatar” stamp when describing the Russians, even when the facts he saw contradicted this. Most used the "witty" French advice: "Scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tatar." And now, for more than two centuries we have been “scraped” and are looking for Asians in us.

In fairness, it should be noted that not all Europeans were engaged in such searches. Some travelers, who had no prejudice against Russia and Russians, left us remarks of a different kind. The Frenchman Leroy-Collier wrote: “Remove the touch of the Tatar yoke, and you will find a European in Russian.” Leroy-Collier cites an interesting remark: "... the long thick beard of the Great Russians is proof of the predominance of Slavic blood in them." The English pundit Baring also says that the Tatars, while having political influence on Russia, had no racial influence. However, the majority of Western Europeans, especially those close to politics, are not concerned about objectivity in relation to Russians.

Ideas about the racial mixing of the Slavs with the Turks, and, consequently, their inferiority, “Asian aggressiveness”, existed and still exist in Europe and America. The source of these ideas is one - fear of Russia and hatred for it. This idea justified the "onslaught on the East" and Charles XII, and Napoleon, and Hitler. For more than two hundred years, the European man in the street has been frightened by Asian hordes from the East, which will bring the death of European/civilization. And now, for more than two centuries, European civilization has been sending “civilized” hordes to the East with enviable constancy, seeking to do away with national Russia and its fundamentally different civilizational form of development.

Possessed by conquest ardor and "industrial envy" of Russian natural wealth, they assure themselves and others that the Russian people belong to an inferior, semi-barbarian race, that they are nothing more than "historical manure", and that "God himself" destined them to conquer , conquest and extermination. The same racist nonsense is consciously repeated by our domestic enemies of historical Russia, unconsciously or semiconsciously calling themselves its patriots.

The modern "democratic" intelligentsia proposes in this regard not to discuss any issues related to the Russian people at all, since such a people supposedly does not exist in nature. There is, they say, only the Russian language and a mass of Russian-speaking people of unknown origin to science, who mistakenly consider themselves Russians.

Either uneducated people or obvious enemies of the Russian people can say such nonsense. Those people who now in Russia call themselves "democratic" intelligentsia and defend these racist nonsense, basically, are both at the same time.

Russian racial type

Having traced the political roots of pseudoscientific calculations about the racial heterogeneity of Russians, their Mongoloid nature, one should also consider a number of issues related to the genetic aspects of the Russian people and the problems of its ethnogenesis.

Beginning with Roman historians, a steady interest in the appearance of historical and modern tribes and peoples has not weakened to the present. This interest is equally shared by both the scientist and the layman. The descriptions of the ancient historians of the appearance of the Gauls, Germans, Scythians and Slavs provided abundant creative “food” for the romantic writers of the last century. Within the framework of this work, we can only take a quick look at the facts left to us by ancient and modern writers about the Slavs and Russians. This topic is directly related to the issues of anthropology and ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs.

The Greek astronomer and geographer Ptolemy (2nd century AD) in his geographical work places some “volts” on the southern coast of the Baltic. Many Slavic scholars, including Shafarik, Braun, Udaltsov, Lovmyansky and Golomb, considered this ethnonym to be Slavic. Golomb reconstructs the ethnonym "veleti", elevating it to the Slavic form "veletъ/volotъ" ("giant"). As we will see below, tall stature has always been a hallmark of the Slavs.

The Gothic historian of the 6th century Jordan, describing the campaigns of the Goths, mentions the people of the Spols. Starting with the studies of the Slavist Mikloshich, the ethnonym “Spali” is compared with the Old Slavonic “giant”, “giant” and related words in other Slavic languages.

Recently, the well-known scientist O.N. Trubachev spoke out in support of this comparison. In particular, he concludes that, in principle, it is impossible to exclude a possible connection between the Gothic epic ethnonym “spols” and the indicated Slavic words. In themselves, cases of the transformation of the name of an ethnic group into a word denoting a giant are quite well known. This happened with the Huns and Antes, who left their mark in the German folk tradition in the form of giants.

The Byzantine historian of the 6th century, Procopius of Caesarea, left a large amount of information about the Slavs and Antes. In particular, he writes that both have the same language. “And in appearance they do not differ from each other. They are tall and of great strength. Their hair and skin color is very white.”

Procopius of Caesarea also describes a very curious case. In 539, the Byzantine commander Belisarius besieges the stubbornly resisting Goths in the city of Auxima, modern Osimo. Belisarius demanded that his subordinate Valerian deliver him a “language”-Goth. The task was not an easy one. The Goths remained in history the most powerful and warlike Germanic tribe. “And so Valerian, having chosen one of the sklavins, distinguished by the size of the body and very skillful, instructed him to bring the enemy warrior, firmly promising that he would receive a lot of money from Belisarius. And at the very dawn, the sklavin, coming close to the wall, hiding in some bushes and huddled with his whole body into a ball, hid near the meadow. And with the onset of day, a Goth, having arrived there, began to quickly gather herbs, not expecting any danger from the bushes, but often looking back at the enemy’s camp, as if someone from there attacked him. Rushing into him from behind, the slave suddenly grabbed him and, strongly squeezing this man across the torso with both hands, brought him to the camp, and so, continuing to carry him, handed him over to Valerian. You can imagine the difference in the physique of these people. But the Slav brought to the camp not a simple man in the street, but a professional warrior.

Syrian historians of the 6th century write about the Slavs as inhabitants of the "seventh climate", their "temperaments" are slowed down because the sun rarely shines over their heads. Syrian authors in this see the reason that the hair of the Slavs is hard, straight and light.

In the 6th century, the Greeks captured three foreigners who had citharas and psaltery instead of weapons. They were brought before the emperor. The emperor asked who they were. “We are Slavs,” the strangers answered, “and we live at the farthest end of the Western Ocean (Baltic Sea).” The emperor marveled at the quiet disposition of these people, their great growth and strength.

Thus, according to the testimony of ancient authors, the Slavs were a powerful, tall people, mostly light-colored. The Russians of the 10th century appear to us exactly the same. The Arab traveler and historian ibn Fadlan met the Rus in Bulgar, on the Volga, and left us precious information. “I have not seen, Ibn Fadlan wrote, people with more perfect bodies than they. They are like palm trees, fair-haired, red-faced, white-bodied.”

Of course, not all Russians and Slavs were completely blond. Since the 19th century, Russian archaeologists have been exploring burial mounds in Eastern Europe. In the mounds left by the Slavs, they find a variety of remains of hair, both blond, and red, and chestnut. It is not surprising that all the major European nations (Russians, Poles, Czechs, Germans, British, Swedes and Norwegians) still include people with various combinations of blond, red and chestnut hair of different shades with blue, gray, green and brown eyes. Exactly the same genetic type was in the medieval European population.

We find important evidence for this work in the treatise of the traveler M. Polo, which is called: “The Book of the Diversity of the World”. In this treatise, M. Polo writes about Russia: “Russia is a large country in the north. Greek rite Christians live here. There are many kings and their own language; the people are simple-hearted and very beautiful; men and women are white and blond.” We are talking about the end of the XIII century. Scientists believe that M. Polo described the Russian population from the upper reaches of the Don. But this is the borderland with the steppe, where, according to the adherents of the idea of ​​racial heterogeneity and Mongoloid Russians, racial contacts between Slavs and Turks should have taken place.

Describing the color of hair and eyes among the Slavs and Russians of the Middle Ages, it is necessary to mention one curious point. In the scientific world, the fact of darkening of the hair and eyes of the European population in the XV-XVIII centuries is known. This process went in parallel with the process of brachycephalization described by the anthropologist Bogdanov in the last century. Scientific facts speak of a purely social factor of urbanization that influenced these processes. In Russia, this process began in the 16th century. Now in Switzerland the process is reversed. Compared with the last century, the skulls of the Swiss are beginning to lengthen. It is possible that similar processes are now taking place in Russia, and, as already mentioned, they are connected with the process of civilization development.

In the same plane lies the problem of fluctuations in population growth. For a long time, there was an opinion in science about the gradual “growth” of the world's population. It was believed that the people of the Middle Ages were smaller than modern people. This is fundamentally wrong. In the early 80s, in the village of Nikolskoye near Moscow, archaeologists unearthed a burial mound of the Vyatichi people of the 12th century. A tall man (1 m 90 cm) was buried in the mound, a light beard and mustache were preserved on the skull. Thus, we see that the medieval population of Russia did not suffer from short stature.

Let's see what foreigners wrote about Russians in the 16th-17th centuries. What did our ancestors look like after the Tatar yoke, did they differ from the ancient Slavs? Let's try to compare.

The 15th-century Venetian diplomat Cantarini writes: “Muscovites, both men and women, are generally beautiful in appearance ...” Fletcher, the English ambassador of the 16th century in Russia, notes: “As for their physique (Russians), they are, more often, of height tall...” The Dutch sailing master Struys, visiting Russia and Livonia in the 17th century, wrote in his travel notes: “Usually Russians are taller than average.” The ambassador of Rome in Moscow from 1670-1673, Reitenfels, described the Russians as follows: “Their hair is, for the most part, blond or red, and they cut it more often than comb it. Their eyes are mostly blue, but they especially appreciate gray ones, with a kind of fiery reddish sheen; most of them look frowningly and wildly. Their heads are big, their chests are wide...” The Dutch merchant of the 18th century, K. fan-Klenk, also states: “Russians or Muscovites, for the most part, are tall and portly people with large heads and thick arms and legs.”

Traveling in time, looking for references to our ancestors from foreign authors, we cannot miss the notes of Europeans about Muscovite Russia of the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries, which will complement the material already cited above. The Venetian merchant Iosophat Barbaro writes: “Russians are very beautiful, both men and women.” Pole Matthew Mekhovsky in the treatise "On two Sarmatians" notes: "Russian people are tall and strong." Hans Moritz Ayrman, a native of Nuremberg, who was in Russia in 1669, echoes them: “... regarding the Muscovites themselves,” he notes, “by their figure, they are mostly large people with a tall body and broad shoulders.”

It is very interesting that an Italian, a Pole and a German note the high growth of Russians in the Middle Ages, having, of course, the opportunity to compare them with Europeans. The same features of the Russian people were noticed in the 19th century by the traveler and diplomat Marquis de Custine, who is hardly suspected of loving Russia. In his pamphlet "Nikolaev's Russia", published first in Europe, immediately after the Marquis's trip to Russia, and then with us, he writes about Russian men whom he met in St. Petersburg. The Marquis de Custine writes: “The Russian people are quite handsome. Men of a purely Slavic race ... are distinguished by their light hair color and bright complexion, especially by the perfection of their profile, reminiscent of Greek statues. Their almond-shaped eyes are Asiatic (?) shaped with northern bluish coloration.” It should be noted that this is almost the only positive observation of the marquis in Russia. Therefore, in this case, one can forgive him the “Asian” form of bluish eyes that came from nowhere.

Thus, we see that for more than ten centuries the Russian people have retained their ethnic identity and brought it to our time. The facts clearly show this in spite of all ill-wishers.

It is important to note that the people themselves have developed certain concepts of beauty. In epics we can find a generalized image of the Russian people as they saw themselves in their epic heroes. These are golden-haired heroes with clear eyes. These are chubby fair-haired girls. The Basurmans are invariably portrayed as black, which is intended to emphasize their spiritual dark essence. In proverbs, sayings, signs of the Russian people, one can often find the phrase “black as a gypsy”. “Gypsies” were also jokingly called fellow villagers who had darker skin, which was immediately evident. In Russian literature of the noble period, one can often find a description of the blond boys of the villagers. Blondness was considered a sign of common people.

A.S. Khomyakov, describing the ancient Wends in "Semiramide" as one of the proofs that the Wends were Slavs, calls them a blond people. Based on the few surviving frescoes of the 11th-12th centuries, we can judge how the Russian people of the Middle Ages looked. There is a 12th-century fresco in the St. Cyril's Church in Kyiv. On it we see a fair-haired warrior. Judging by the frescoes of the 11th century in the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, it should be noted that brown-haired people predominated in Southern Russia.

What did the Russian people of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries look like? Let us turn to authoritative reference books, which provide an interesting table of “types of guards soldiers”. We will cite it in full, since it perfectly shows what racial subtypes make up a single Russian ethnos.

So, the table of “types of guards soldiers”:

Preobrazhensky regiment: tall blondes, 3rd and 5th companies with beards.

Semenovsky: tall brown-haired, without beards. Izmailovsky: brunettes, company E.V. (His Majesty) with beards. Jaeger: light build, all hair colors. Moscow: redheads, with beards. Grenadier: brunettes, company E.V. with beards.

Pavlovsky: snub-nosed, E.V. company: high; 5th company: blondes; 2nd rifleman: brunettes, 3rd rifleman: no specific type, 4th rifleman: short-nosed with bushy eyebrows connected.

Cavalier Guard: tall blue-eyed and gray-eyed blonds, without beards.

Equestrian: tall, burning brunettes with mustaches; 4th squadron with beards.2

Cuirassier of His Majesty: tall, red, long-nosed. Her Majesty's Cuirassier: tall, swarthy brunettes. Cossack of His Majesty: brunettes and brown-haired with beards. Atamansky: blondes with beards. Consolidated Cossack: all colors of hair with beards. Horse Grenadier: brunettes, with mustaches, no beards. Dragoon: brown hair, no beards.

Hussar of His Majesty: well-built brown-haired, squadron E.V. with a blond beard.

Lancers of His Majesty: dark brown-haired and brunettes, with mustaches.

Grodno hussars: brunettes with beards.

Gendarme squadron: no specific type.

So, a wide panorama of various Russian types, presented in the description of employees of various guards regiments, suggests that in the racial subtypes of Russians we can distinguish three types: northern (blonds and redheads), transitional (brown-haired) and southern Russian (brunettes).

We note the Pavlovsky regiment, where snub-nosed soldiers were recruited. The fact is that, contrary to popular belief, in Russia there are not so many snub-nosed people among the Slavic population. Anthropologists have determined that the highest “snub-nosed” coefficient is noted in the Baltic, in the German state of Brandenburg.

Let us turn again to the notes of foreigners of the 15th-17th centuries about Russia. All of them unanimously testify to the amazing health and endurance of Russians. The Austrian diplomat Baron Meyerberg wrote in XVII:

“It is strange to say, but with such a disorderly life of both sexes in Muscovy (?), many live to a ripe old age, never having experienced any illness. There you can see seventy-year-old old men who have retained all their strength, with such strength in their muscular hands that they can endure work that our young people cannot bear at all. One must think that healthy air helps a lot to such good health, which is not disturbed by learning in any of them, as it is with us. The Muscovites say, however, that this is more because they neglect the art of medicine. In all of Muscovy there is not a single doctor or pharmacist, and although in my time the Tsar gave a rather generous allowance to three doctors at his palace, this must be attributed only to his imitation of foreign Sovereigns, because he himself never uses their labors, lower than anyone or another of the Muscovites. Those who are ill despise all the correct remedies of Hippocrates, hardly allowing themselves to apply external medicines. Rather, they will resort to conspiracies of old women and Tatars. And with disgust from food and to quench the heat, they use vodka and garlic.

Even earlier, at the beginning of the 17th century, the Frenchman Jacob Margeret wrote the same thing about Russians: “Many Russians live to be 80,100,120 years old, and only in old age are they familiar with illnesses. Medical allowances are used only by the king and some of the most important nobles; and common people even consider many medicinal things unclean: they take pills very reluctantly, they hate washing, musk, muskrat and other similar drugs. Feeling unwell, they usually drink a good glass of wine, pouring a charge of gunpowder into it or mixing the drink with crushed garlic, and immediately go to the bathhouse, where they sweat for two or three hours in the unbearable heat. This is how the common people are treated in all diseases. This is truly a mighty race of the northern limits of the earth, as our wonderful publicist of the beginning of the 20th century M.O. Menshikov wrote about the simple Russian people with respect and love.

It was not by chance that we touched upon the issues of the health of the nation. The fact is that health seriously affects the biological indicators of the people. As we have seen, all foreign authors from antiquity to the beginning of the 20th century describe the Slavs and Russians as tall and powerful people.

The situation is more complicated with the growth indicators of Russians today. This problem is extremely serious. At the beginning of our century, it was directly associated with the health of the nation. MO Menshikov was the first to raise these questions. In the article “National Congress” (01/23/1914), he writes that a hundred years ago, the tallest army in Europe (Suvorov’s “miracle heroes”), the Russian army at the beginning of our century was already the shortest, and a terrifying percentage recruits had to be rejected for service. Menshikov M.O. He also pointed to the reasons for the loss of the health of the nation and the decline in growth rates. The first reason is infant mortality, unprecedented on such a scale in Europe. The second is “... the poorly thought-out reform of 1861, which released tens of millions of people, previously robbed, ignorant, impoverished, not armed with culture, and now all the curves of the people's welfare went down sharply.” The third reason is the consequences of the first two: "Lack of land, usurious credit from kulaks and world eaters, a flooded sea of ​​drunkenness - all this led to a decline in the spirit of the people."

M.O. Menshikov writes that this was followed by a series of famine years and cholera and typhoid epidemics, which are explained not only by physical causes, but also by the psychological decline of the race, a decrease in the ability to fight disasters and overcome them. Here are a few more quotes from the same article. “Over the past half century, the physical exhaustion of our once mighty race, which began a long time ago, has completely developed.” And again: “I don’t want to frighten, but in fact the position of the Russian people in zoological terms has become extremely unfavorable.”

All this was written almost 80 years ago. We are forced to admit that the situation has only worsened. And the problem posed by M.O. Menshikov: “How to create a position in Russia for the Russian tribe that really corresponds to its great historical labors and sacrifices” is still acute for our people.

blood and spirit

It is no coincidence that we turn to Germany when we talk about racial problems and racial theory. It was Germany of the 20th century that made biological racism the basis of the new National Socialist ideology. This fact has turned anthropology into a "forgotten" science.

We are interested in the following material. In the 30s, just before the war, representatives of the Ahnenerbe Institute under the guise of sales representatives, traveling around Russia, collected anthropological material. One of the reports to Germany stated that the bulk of the Russians, with the exception of the Mordovians, Tatars, Bashkirs and Mari, were undoubtedly of Aryan origin and should be subject to assimilation by the Germans. Along with this, the Poles, Lithuanians, part of the Latvians and Estonians were threatened with complete annihilation. The fact is that the German “scientists” did not detect the Aryan element among these peoples in the proper percentage ratio to the mass of the population. However, in Germany itself, official propaganda continued to talk about the racial inferiority of Russians.

After the defeat at Stalingrad and on the Kursk Bulge, anthropological measurements of Russian prisoners of war were made in concentration camps. Goebbels was reported that most Russians have purely Aryan cranial proportions. This information shocked the top of the ideological apparatus of the Reich.

Now, in our time, all this seems savagery. But in the III Reich, this issue was of paramount importance. True, many already then criticized the Nazis for flat biologism in matters of race. The famous scientist and traditionalist thinker Julius Evola, who welcomed the coming to power of the fascists in Italy, writes two important works: “Synthesis of Racial Teaching” and “Remarks on Racial Education”. Evola singled out three types or stages of race - the “race of the body”, the “race of the soul” and the “race of the spirit”, which, as he believed, do not always coincide. As an example of this three-stage scheme, Evola cited the Scandinavian peoples, who can least of all be called spiritual Aryans, conscious of the “highest values ​​of the Aryan Tradition”, although in purely biological terms they can be considered a model of the white race.

Indeed, the Scandinavians in history least of all demonstrated strong-willed effort aimed at creating their own Empire of northern spiritual values. Only Rome and the German emperors set themselves such a task in Europe, and in Eurasia - the Greeks and Russians.

With certain reservations, taking Evola's scheme as a working model, we can state the fact that the "race of the body" and the "race of the soul" in principle coincide among many peoples of Europe - among the Germans, and the Anglo-Saxons, and the French, and Russians. But the “race of the spirit”, spiritual Aryanism, if you like, was preserved only by the Russians as faithful guardians of the Orthodox faith.

Quite definitely, questions of the spirit and questions of the blood have a close relationship in our world, created by the Lord. Questions of blood and spirit are so important for humanity that it is simply impossible to ignore them. These questions raised almost all wars up to the New Time, when wars became the result of the economic interests of peoples. But the theme of spirit and blood continued to sound in bloody upheavals until, in the middle of the 20th century, it again became the main one in the greatest war in our history.

This cannot be explained by chance or the power of propaganda. After the collapse of fascism and National Socialism, questions of blood were tabooed, as the question really became bloody. They preferred to forget about spirituality, the spirit of the nation. This most important category of people's existence, as it were, did not exist at all. But the ban and almost religious taboo only spurred people's unsatisfied interest in the mysteries of blood and spirit. And this knowledge is necessary for people. But the truth here can only be known with the help of Christian anthropology. Any scientific theories only lead away from a correct understanding of the issue, giving rise to pseudoscientific and occult interpretations, which all the more lead to a dead end.

In our spirit, in our blood, we carry the sacred heritage of our fathers and grandfathers. We do not remember them all, leaving an endless chain of generations in the depths of centuries. But they all live in us thanks to our blood, our spirit. It is in this sense that our blood is sacred to us. Together with her, our parents give us not only flesh, but also our unique consciousness. To deny the meaning of blood is not just to deny oneself and one's uniqueness in the world, but also God's plan for oneself and one's people. The ancients knew that blood is the bearer of spirit and life. Thanks to the blood, we carry within us the sacred secret of creation. Different nationalities are the greatest creation of the Lord. Nothing and no one in the world, no party or religion has the right to violate the Divine order and desire to make all people the same, depriving them of their national identity.

For five centuries, Russia waged uninterrupted wars and lived in a military camp. In constant wars, Russia lost her best sons, the strongest and healthiest men. The twentieth century could be the last in the history of the Russian people: two world wars, a civil war, the repressions of 1918-1953, when the best representatives of all Russian classes were destroyed, the war in Afghanistan and the ongoing hidden genocide brought the Russians to the last line, beyond which already non-existence. Our gene pool is significantly undermined, but we are alive and must act.

It is absolutely necessary to stimulate the birth rate among Russians, but this is not enough. The Russian people need people who are spiritually and physically healthy, and for this it is necessary to improve the very spirit of the nation, which, according to N.M. Karamzin, has gained dominance over a sixth part of the world with courage and courage and is worthy of a great future.

First of all, we must help our people regain a sense of unity, historical and blood relationship with our great ancestors. We need the national pride we have lost. We must end the feelings of inferiority imposed on us. With a thousand years of heroic history, we have proved our greatness. We need responsibility for future generations. This is the guarantee of our future development.

The given scientific data is more than enough to firmly state that the anthropological and genetic unity of the Russian people is a strictly scientific fact. We are flesh from flesh, blood from blood, descendants of our glorious ancestors. And in the awareness of this blood connection, we must draw strength for our rebirth. And to everyone who doubts our unity, to everyone who speaks and writes about the Slavic-Turkic symbiosis, to everyone who does not know where his ancestors stood on the Kulikovo field, we must firmly answer that our ancestors stood under the banner of Dmitry Donskoy and honestly and menacingly carried in their hearts the image of the Savior Not Made by Hands. And we, their descendants, have accepted and menacingly carry this our sacred banner of the Orthodox Russian people.

The Russian ethnos arose on the basis of the Eastern Slavs. The very question of the origin of the Slavs is not easy, there is a lot of unknown. As sources, one has to compare the messages of Russian chronicles, the chronicles of Roman, Byzantine, Eastern authors, archeological data, languages, geographical names. Scientists are still arguing where the ancestral home of the Slavs was, when and how they settled in the East European Plain. There are many theories. Slavic peoples speak Indo-European languages. The time of separation of the Slavs (their ancestors) from the Indo-European linguistic and ethnic community is attributed to the 2-1 millennium BC, i.e. 3-4 thousand years ago, these tribes settled in Europe, their language began to stand out. These were settled agricultural tribes, conditionally we will call them "peoples of the forest." In addition to the Slavs, other peoples also lived in Eastern Europe - Finnish-speaking tribes (the ancestors of the Mordovians, Mari, Udmurts, etc.). The Slavs were engaged in settled agriculture, hunting, forest beekeeping, fishing, and domestic cattle breeding. For the first time in written sources, the Roman historians of the 1st centuries Pliny, Tacitus, Ptalighey wrote about them. They called the Slavs Wends or Antes. They wrote that they lived in the basins of the Vistula River and along the shores of the Venedsky Gulf (Baltic Sea). The Slavs raided the outskirts of the Roman Empire (Byzantium) South of the forest was a steppe zone. The steppe zone of Eastern Europe has been a place of nomadic pastoral tribes for centuries. More militant, mobile. For centuries, they slowly moved across the steppes of Eurasia from east to west. Let's call them "Peoples of the steppe". This was the era of the Great Migration of Peoples (VIII BC - VII AD). these peoples influenced each other. The peoples of the steppe also participated in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs. By the 8th century, the Slavs were divided into southern, western and eastern, but the commonality of culture and the similarity of languages ​​were still preserved (Southern Slavs are the ancestors of Serbs, Croats, Butars, western - Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, eastern - Ukrainians , Russians, Belarusians) The Eastern Slavs gradually formed a new ethnic community, which was conditionally called the Old Russian people. These were Slavic unions of tribes, but this is not yet a Russian ethnic group. Pagans dominated Kievan Rus, even after the adoption of Christianity in 988. Only by the 13th century did Orthodox Christianity become the basis of the spiritual life of the majority of the population. It was Orthodoxy that became the unifying Orthodox idea, and on this basis, the Russian ethnos arose in the 14th-15th centuries. At the same time, Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnic groups were formed on the territory of Ukraine and Belarus.

Ethnonym "Russians",

1. In the Carpathians (Ukraine) there is a river Ros. The chronicler Nestor believed that the ethnonym "Russians" came from the name of the river.

2. Lev Gumilyov put forward a theory according to which the "Russians" descended from the Scythian tribe - they were scattered.

3. From the Old Norse language, the word "Rus" is translated as "rower", the leader of which substantiated the Old Russian state.