Political Consolidation and Disintegration

Following the untimely death of Sviatoslav in 972, his successors were left with an enormous territorial expanse stretching from the edge of the Ukrainian steppe in the south to the Gulf of Finland and lake region of Russia in the north.

General success in these two areas lasted, albeit with interruptions, until about 1132. Thereafter, internal divisiveness and external threats increased, with the result that Kievan Rus' entered a period of disintegration and gradual diffusion of political authority. The era of disintegration was to last just over a century, culmi­nating during the Mongol invasions of 1237-1240 and the subsequent realign­ment of political power within the Kievan realm.

The six years between the death of Sviatoslav and the accession of the first of the charismatic leaders, Volodymyr the Great, revealed one of the fundamental problems of Kievan Rus', namely, the transfer of power from one grand prince to the next. Traditionally, the Varangian Rus' rulers treated the lands they con­trolled as their private property, passing it on to their male offspring.

Of Sviatoslav’s three sons, laropolk, Oleh, and Volodymyr, the eldest, laropolk, became grand prince (reigned 972-980). laropolk’s rule witnessed frequent con­flict between him and his brothers, however, resulting in the death in 977 of Oleh, who had been assigned to rule the Derevlianians. Oleh’s murder frightened the youngest brother, Volodymyr, who was ruling in Novgorod. Fearing for his own life, Volodymyr fled to Scandinavia. He returned in 980 with a Varangian army, re­established himself in Novgorod, then turned southward and drove laropolk out of Kiev. That same year, Volodymyr had laropolk killed and began his long reign as grand prince, until 1015. In the absence of rival claimants to the grand princely throne, Kievan Rus' was spared internecine warfare for nearly four decades.

Volodymyr the Great

Volodymyr the Great was able to extend the territorial sphere of Kievan Rus' and to enhance its internal cohesion. In contrast to his father, Sviatoslav, who had been interested in expanding southward into the Balkans, Volodymyr concen­trated on the lands of the East Slavs, subduing the Viatichians and Radimichians. He also strengthened his realm’s frontiers by defeating the Volga Bulgars in the east, by capturing Cherven', Przemysl, and other borderland cities from the Poles in the west, and by holding back advances by the latvigians or Sudavians (a Baltic people related to the Lithuanians living along the Neman River) from the north.

In the Varangian tradition, Volodymyr used his numerous legitimate and ille­gitimate sons as personal representatives throughout his far-flung Kievan patri­mony. It was, in fact, during Volodymyr’s reign that Kievan Rus' reached its greatest territorial extent, an achievement that prompted the chroniclers to describe his military activity in poetic terms as the ‘gathering of the lands of Rus'.’ By Volodymyr’s time, the Rus' lands no longer coincided with the homelands of the various East Slavic tribes, but rather with the spheres of influence of the lead­ing commercial and military-political centers, from which they often derived their names. Thus arose the seven lands of Pereiaslav, Chernihiv, Galicia-Volhynia, Polatsk, Smolensk, Rostov-Suzdal', and Novgorod. All were satellites of Kiev and its grand prince, who assigned his offspring to rule as local princes over them. In this regard, Kievan Rus' was not a unified state, but rather a typical medieval con­glomerate of various lands or principalities based on a common familial relation­ship to the grand prince ruling in Kiev (see map 7).

The idea that the realm of Rus' as a whole formed a single entity began to take hold during the reign of Volodymyr the Great, at least among the princely, mili­tary, and commercial elite of Kievan society. The very term Rus', which until then had been associated simply with the Varangian princes, now began to take on a new connotation. Rus' came to mean the territories and their inhabitants living under the rule of Volodymyr the Great and his filial representatives. Because of