Socioeconomic and Cultural Developments

The political history of Kievan Rus' outlined in the last two chapters emphasized as much the disunity as the unity of the realm. During its first three stages of development, the first (the 87OS-972) witnessed the slow growth of the realm out­ward from the Kiev and Novgorod regions, while the third (1132-1240) witnessed the steady breakdown of any effective political authority over Kievan Rus' as a whole.

The era of consolidation was clearly an exception. It could therefore be argued that most of Kievan Rus' history during its first three stages, and certainly during its fourth stage (1240-1349), is not that of a unified realm or state. Rather, it is the history of several individual lands or principalities, each with its own ruler and each vying for greater independence vis-à-vis its neighbors and vis-à-vis the so- called senior ruler, the grand prince in Kiev. Aside from the general absence of political unity, Kievan Rus' encompassed a vast territory, with regions that differed greatly in geography and in the language of the inhabitants. Tribal distinctions going back to the era of the dispersion of the Slavic peoples also persisted into the Kievan era. All these factors have prompted certain historians and linguists to see already in the Kievan Rus' period of eastern European history a clear indication of territorial differentiation that should be considered as the first stage in the subse­quent distinct evolution of the Ukrainian, Belarusan, and Russian peoples.

Notwithstanding certain periods of political unity, therefore, the modern-day observer might legitimately ask why writers continue to discuss the historical expe­rience of Kievan Rus' as a whole instead of tracing the histories of each of its com­ponent parts.

Demography and social structure

It is estimated that by the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the total pop­ulation of Kievan Rus' was approximately seven to eight million people. At about the same time in western Europe, territorially much smaller Germany (the Holy Roman Empire) also had approximately eight million people, and France about fifteen million. Thus, the population density of Kievan Rus' was very low com­pared with that of western Europe. On the other hand, nearly a million people lived in towns and cities. This meant that 13 percent of Rus' inhabitants were urban dwellers, a percentage much higher than in any contemporary western European country.

Historians still debate whether it was international trade or the needs of the internal local economy that caused the rise of towns in Kievan Rus'. There is no question, however, that their numerical growth was rapid. For instance, whereas in the ninth and tenth centuries the chronicles refer to only 23 towns in Kievan Rus' (13 of them located in Ukrainian lands), by the mid-thirteenth century there were close to 300. These numbers made an impression on outsiders, with the result that Scandinavian sources refer to Kievan Rus' as the ‘land of towns’ (Gardariki). The vast majority of these towns contained no more than 1,000 inhab­itants, although a few (Chernihiv, Volodymyr, and Halych in Ukrainian lands; Novgorod, Vladimir-na-Kliazma, Polatsk, and Smolensk farther north) may have reached between 20,000 and 30,000 inhabitants by the early thirteenth century.

As for its social structure, the population of Kievan Rus' was essentially divided into six strata, most of which included several subgroups. Of the six categories, three could be considered the ruling elite: the grand prince and his family; the druzhyna and boyars; and the church people. The other three, subordinate strata were the townspeople, peasants, and slaves.

It should be kept in mind that the references to these various social strata are to women as well as to men. Both customary and written law in Kievan Rus' pro­tected a woman’s right to property within the context of the family unit and accorded her personal protection equal to that accorded men. As a result, women not only worked alongside men as artisans and farmers, but in the absence of their husbands enjoyed legal rights to administer shops and fields - not to men­tion the leadership roles played by women in the princely social strata, who often functioned as regents and, in the case of OF ha, as grand prince in her own right.

The ruling social strata

The grand prince of Kiev and his offspring throughout the realm were originally of Scandinavian origin, as is evident in the names of the earliest rulers - Helgi (Oleh), Ingvar (Ihor), Helga (Ol'ha), Sveinald (Sviatoslav). By the late tenth cen-

The Social Structure oe Kievan Rus'

THE RULING SOCIAL STRATA

1 Princes (kniazi)

the grand prince and his family regional princes and their families

2 Prince’s retinue (druzhyna) and boyars

3 Church people

hierarchs

clergy (priests, monks, deacons) church employees

THE SUBORDINATE SOCIAL STRATA

4 Townspeople

artisans

workers

5 Peasants

freepersons (smrtdy) half-free persons (zakupy)

6 Slaves (fheliad'lkholopy}

OTHER SOCIAL STRATA

7 Izgoi (persons whose social status had changed)

8 Frontier military settlers (Chorni Klobuky)

tury, the princely strata had intermarried with notables in the local Slavic popula­tion with the result that the Varangian element was rapidly assimilated.

At the same time, the number of princes and their families increased. The increase was a result of the practice of dividing the realm among the sons and younger brothers of the grand prince, a practice that took greater hold following the reign of laroslav the Wise, when distinct dynasties were established in each of the lands or groups of lands of Kievan Rus'. The princely stratum was made up of all persons who were of royal blood. According to terminology that was to be developed in the fourteenth century and applied retrospectively, this meant per­sons who were descendants of the semi-legendary Riuryk/Hroerkr and therefore part of the house of Riuryk - the Riurykids or the Riurykovyches.

As a result of intermarriage with members of the local Slavic elite as well as with Byzantine and, later, Polovtsian royal families, the pure Varangian element among the Rus' princes progressively decreased. Nonetheless, Kiev’s princes retained the traditional Varangian attitude that the Rus' realm - or, more pre­cisely, that part of it they were able effectively to control - was their hereditary possession (votchind), to be exploited for whatever riches it might yield. It is not surprising, therefore, that the early Varangian rulers and their retainers lived apart from the rest of the population, which, like the countryside it inhabited, was perceived as an object for the exaction of tribute and for exploitation. The princes also took an active role in the economy, in regulating weights and meas­ures and in holding a direct or indirect monopoly over certain industries or trade. The grand princes, moreover, were automatically entitled to one-third of all the revenue collected by the state. Accordingly, the struggle for control of the various princely posts - in particular the grand prince’s throne in Kiev - was often moti­vated by the desire not only for political prestige, but also for concrete economic advantages.

The next ruling stratum of Rus' society was the druzhyna and boyars, who formed two distinct groups in the early centuries but became merged into one over time.

The boyars are described in the early sources as the luchshie liudi ‘better people’ or muzhi narochitie ‘prominent men’. They were descended from the ruling groups within the local East Slavic tribes, or were persons who by their wealth or service to the Varangian princes were recognized as among the leaders of society. With the merger of the originally Scandinavian druzhyna and the Slavic boyars in the second half of the eleventh century, the group formed a stratum of great landowners. Although the land they acquired was frequently given to them as a reward or pay­ment for services rendered the prince, the boyars had full title to the land as per­sonal property (votchind) and were not required to render further service to retain it. A lord-vassal relationship similar to that in some parts of western Europe there­fore did not exist between princes and boyars throughout most of Kievan Rus'. Only in the far western Rus' land of Galicia-Volhynia did the pattern exist whereby boyars formed a defined social group bound by mutual agreement in vassalage to the prince, who often granted them lands as fiefdoms.

The third ruling stratum consisted of church people. They included not only the clergy, but all those who in some way served the church or its institutions - church singers, candle extinguishers, wafer makers, physicians, and other person­nel in hospitals and homes for the aged or for pilgrims. The clergy proper con­sisted of both the black clergy (monks) and the white clergy (parish priests and deacons).

The church established in Kievan Rus' after the official acceptance of Christi­anity at the end of the tenth century followed the Byzantine model. Initially, most of the clerical personnel at all levels was of Byzantine origin, and the heads, or metropolitans, of the Kievan church were, with few exceptions, also Byzantines. Among the Byzantine features of church organization established in Kievan Rus' were juridical autonomy, the tradition of asylum for persons who lost their social status (the so-called izgoi), and, most important, the right of church hierarchs and monasteries to own and exploit landed property. From the outset, the bishops and some monastic communities played an important role in the economic life of towns and cities, often sharing (or challenging) princely prerogatives over the control of weights and measures or over monopolies in the production or proc­essing of certain goods. By the twelfth century, as a result of the growth of the monastic movement and its colonizing efforts throughout the vast Kievan country­side, the church had become one of the leading landowners in Kievan Rus'. During the fourth stage of Kievan Rus' history, under Mongol hegemony (1240­1349), the church increased its wealth even further with the approval of the Mongol rulers, who often chose cooperation with the stabilizing force of the church (whose clergy the Mongols enriched further) rather than with the poten­tially disruptive secular Rus' princes.

The subordinate social strata

Below the ruling strata were the townspeople, peasants, and slaves. Each of these strata had, in turn, several subgroups. As centers of political as well as economic and religious power, the towns included members of both the ruling and the sub­ordinate strata. Among the ruling groups were the local prince and/or his repre­sentatives, boyars, church hierarchs, and rich merchants (go tty) of local Rus' or foreign origin (Armenian, Greek, German, and Jewish in Kiev; mostly German in northern Rus' cities).

Most of the townspeople, however, were workers and artisans of various kinds (the so-called molodshie liudi ‘younger people’) or owners of artisanal enterprises (zhit'i liudi ‘well-to-do people’). In subsequent writings, these workers and arti­sans have generally been described as the middle classes. In order to protect their economic interests, they organized into guilds which frequently corresponded with certain sections or streets in the city.

To express their views on political issues, townspeople spoke out at the viche, or public town meeting. Meetings took place in the open air of the town square whenever the need arose. While the viche never became a permanent or organ­ized body with a fixed number of members, as a political body it played a decisive role at times in the chief cities of Kievan Rus'. For instance, some say it was the vichem Kiev that invited Askol'd and Dir to rule over the city in the mid-ninth cen­tury, just as it was the viche in Kiev that called upon Volodymyr Monomakh to become grand prince in 1113. The existence of the viche and its increasing influ­ence during the twelfth century in the leading cities of Kiev and Novgorod has given rise to subsequent descriptions of Kievan Rus' as a democratic society. In practice, however, the viche often became the instrument of only the most power­ful elements in the city, the rich merchants. Similarly, the leading urban official, the tysiats'kyi, fluctuated between supporting the interests of the ruling authorities and supporting those of the urban masses. As commander of the city militia (as distinct from the troops of the prince’s retinue), the tysiats’kyi was originally elected by the townspeople of each city, although eventually the holder of the post was appointed (except in Novgorod) by the local prince, usually from among the boyars.

The largest number of inhabitants in Kievan Rus' were the peasants, who lived in the countryside and were divided into several groups differentiated by their legal status. The so-called smerdy, or rural freepersons, lived on their own land or on the land of the princes. They engaged in agriculture and cattle raising. All paid taxes to the prince. Those settled on the prince’s land were also expected to provide horses for his troops and to supply men for his army in time of war. The smerdy often lived in large communal settlements.

In the pre-Varangian and early post-Varangian eras, these communal units were composed of extended families called zadruga, but by the tenth or the eleventh century the familial units had been transformed into territorial units in which the members were united by common social and economic interests. These territorial units came to be known as the verv in the southern Rus' lands and as the mir in Novgorod and the north. Living in unprotected rural areas, the smerdy were the group who most often felt the brunt of the nomadic invasions and, even more destructive for them, the interprincely feuds. By the time of the era of disintegra­tion (1132-1240), it had become common for a Rus' prince, when attacking his rival, to destroy the rival’s livestock, grain stores, and villages and to carry off his peasants, making them slaves and settling them on his own lands or selling them to the Polovtsians. Even the most benevolent of the princes, Volodymyr Monomakh, was not averse to such practices. Besides the ravages of the Rus' princes and the nomads, local boyars - themselves interested in expanding their landholdings and controlling the rural population - often took advantage of economic or other cri­ses to gain full or partial control over the peasantry. In this way, the interprincely wars and the economic greed of the boyars combined to reduce many smerdy from the status of rural freepersons to some degree of servitude or to full slavery.

Among those whose status changed were the so-called zakupy, or half-free per­sons. They included persons, some of whom were peasants, temporarily deprived of their freedom. The reason was often indebtedness, although they could regain the status of freepersons by paying a fee. The numbers of zakupy fluctuated. They generally rose during periods of declining economic conditions, which were caused, in part, by the interprincely wars and nomadic invasions. Such periods of economic decline also coincided with efforts on the part of the local boyars to increase the profits from their own landholdings by keeping control over the pro­ductive capacity of the zakupy. Their control made it even harder for the zakupy to attain emancipation or to return to the smerd, or freeperson, category.

At the bottom of the social order were the slaves, known originally as cheliad’ and later as kholopy. They were the outright property of their owners and had no rights. Owners were not even held liable for killing slaves. A person other than the owner who killed a slave was liable only to pay the owner a monetary fee, as one would for an animal. The greatest source of slavery was the frequent conflict among boyars and princes, in which the victors often gained warriors captured in battle as well as peasants taken from the lands of the defeated belligerent. The existence of these two kinds of slave contributed to the evolution of temporary and permanent slavery. Captured warriors were considered temporary slaves, whose freedom could be obtained by political agreement. The stolen peasants became permanent slaves with no legal rights unless as individuals they were granted freedom or somehow were able to purchase it from their owner.

Other social strata

At least two groups did not fit into any of the strata in the social order of Kievan Rus'. One of these consisted of the so-called izgoi, a heterogeneous body of peo­ple, including princes without territory, sons of priests who could neither read nor write, merchants who had gone bankrupt, and slaves who had bought their freedom. In short, the izgoi were people whose social status had changed and who therefore did not fit into the existing social order. The izgoi often found refuge on church lands.

The other group outside Kiev’s social structure were the Chomi Klobuky, or Black Caps. These were Turkic peoples from the steppes, such as the Pechenegs, Berendei, and Torks, who had been pushed out of their homeland by the arrival of the Polovtsians in the eleventh century. The Polovtsians, or Kipchaks, set up their own nomadic-sedentary state known as Desht-i-Kipchak (The Steppe of the Kipchaks). It was based in the region between the Donets’ and lower Don Rivers, from which, between the mid-eleventh and mid-thirteenth centuries, the Polov­tsians were able to control the Ukrainian steppe as far west as the lower Danube River and Carpathian Mountains. The Pechenegs, Berendei, and Torks, who were sworn enemies of the Polovtsians, sought refuge in the Rus' lands. Known as the Chomi Klobuky, the refugees later formed the Karakalpak federation, which remained loyal to the Rus' princes. These ‘loyal Turks,’ referred to in the chroni­cles as ‘our pagans’ (svoi paganye), settled along the southern frontier of Kievan Rus', in the valley of the Ros' River, near the outpost of Torchesk. The Chomi Klobuky also had a permanent garrison stationed in Kiev, which together with their frontier forces came to play an important role in Kievan Rus' society, often intervening in interprincely succession disputes and civil wars. The Chomi Klobuky along the southern frontier of the Kiev principality, like the politically strong boyars in Galicia-Volhynia, were exceptional phenomena, since most lands throughout Kievan Rus' had the same social structure.

The legal system

Another integrating feature of Kievan Rus' society was the legal system. A legal code was written down in the eleventh century, and it became the standard used by all courts throughout the realm. The result was that through the legal system the inhabitants of Kievan Rus' - regardless of which principality they resided in or which prince controlled it at a given time - acquired or were able to recognize a common tradition in which there were certain recognized norms of behavior.

In this regard, the most important development was the codification known as the Pravda Russkaia, or Rus’ Law, which was first compiled at laroslav the Wise’s behest during the mid-eleventh century (the Short Version, with forty-three sections). The code was later supplemented by his successors, especially Volody­myr Monomakh, during the twelfth century (the Expanded Version). The large number of copies of the Rus' Law that have subsequently been uncovered sug­gests that it was widely used and served the practical purpose of allowing judges to render decisions on the basis of commonly accepted norms. In effect, the Rus' Law was a compilation of (1) customary law preserved in the form of oral tradition that had been in use on Rus' territory since pre-Varangian times, and (2) princely decrees (in the Expanded Version) formulated in response to specific cases that therefore became supplementary to customary law. The Rus' Law contained provisions for civil law (concerning property, obligations, family) and criminal law. The most notable aspect of the criminal provisions was that pun­ishments took the form of seizure of property, banishment, or, more often, pay­ment of a fine. Even murder and other severe crimes (arson, organized horse thieving, robbery) were settled by monetary fines. Although the death penalty had been introduced by Volodymyr the Great, it too was soon replaced by fines.

The Rus' Law also reflected the generally equal status accorded women in Kievan Rus' society. The murderer of a woman, for instance, was treated in the same manner as the murderer of a man. In contrast to the practice in several other contemporary European societies, if a wife in Kievan Rus' survived her hus­band, she was not assigned a legal guardian, but functioned as head of the family and determined (unless it was otherwise stated in her husband’s will) when to grant sons their patrimony. When family property was divided, the wife kept and administered her own share.

The economic order

The very rise of Kievan Rus' was directly related to the needs of international com­merce. The Varangian princes, beginning with Oleh in the last decades of the ninth century, were primarily concerned with securing control over the lands immediately adjacent to the lucrative north-south trade route, the great waterway ‘from the Varangians to the Greeks.’ With this goal in mind, Oleh’s successors continued to subdue and periodically to reassert their authority over the various East Slavic tribes along the routes that connected the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Accordingly, the importance of international trade as an integrating factor in early Kievan Rus' seems indisputable.

As for the realm’s subsequent development, historians so far have been unable to resolve the question of whether international trade (Kliuchevskii) or agricul­ture (Grekov) was the mainstay of economic life. Whereas both factors were present throughout Kievan economic evolution, their respective importance var­ied along with local and, especially, international political conditions. In a real sense, the Varangian Rus' were the successors of the Khazars, in that they contin­ued the tradition of international commerce that linked Central Asia and the Middle East with the markets of Byzantium and Europe. Like the Khazars, the Rus' gained control of the international trade routes, from which they derived income in the form of customs duties paid by merchants and traders. Also, like the Khazars and even the Scythians before them, the Rus' dominated the local East Slavic and Finnic populations, from whom they exacted tribute (especially furs and hides) and, later, taxes.

The products of this international trade remained essentially the same from the time of the Scythians to that of the Khazars and the Varangian Rus'. From the lands of Kievan Rus' came honey, wax, flax, hemp, hides, sometimes grain, and the particularly valuable furs and slaves. These were exchanged for wines, silk fab­rics, naval equipment,jewelry, glassware, and artworks (especially icons, after the introduction of Christianity) from Byzantium, and for spices, precious stones, silk and satin fabrics, and metal weapons from Central Asia and the Arab Middle East. The basic pattern thus saw Kievan Rus' as a supplier of raw materials, for which manufactured goods, especially luxury items, were received in return.

Trade routes did change, however. The so-called Saracen route along the Volga River, used by the Varangians to connect their bases in the Rostov-Suzdal' region with the Khazar Kaganate and from there farther south across the Caspian Sea to the Middle East, by the late ninth century had been replaced in importance by the Baltic-Black Sea trade route. The goal of the new route, which passed through Kiev, was Byzantium. In good conditions, the trip by boat from Kiev to Constantinople took six weeks.

Beginning in the tenth century, when the Dnieper and Volga trade routes were increasingly threatened by the Pechenegs, and then in the twelfth century, when they were cut off by the Polovtsians, the international trade pattern of Kievan Rus' shifted. Novgorod turned its attention away from the south and toward the economic sphere of the Baltic Sea, trading the products of the far northern Rus' lands (especially furs) directly to northern and western Europe. In the south, the east-west overland route to Galicia increased in significance, especially because Kiev came to depend on Halych for the valuable medieval commodity salt (the basic preservative of food), which after the twelfth century could no longer effec­tively be brought up the Dnieper River from the Crimea. Aside from its east-west salt route, Galicia was crossed by several international trade routes that connected