A recent talking point on the lips of several figures of the right (Steve Bannon, JD Vance, Tucker Carlson) is that the war in Ukraine is a fratricidal conflict between two Slavic peoples, and that the United States should play no part in it. Though I don’t know if such rhetoric is politically incorrect apathy or a progressive indictment of Western meddling, it’s not too far a stretch to still consider these neighbors Brothers in Arms. Their common trench is the Ukrainian landmass, as it has been for centuries, so to what extent these people are brothers ultimately depends on whether we’re talking poetry, politics or paleogenetics.
The early history of the Slavs is about as murky as the forests, swamps and marshes that the ancient writers ascribe to their abode. This homeland was situated at the intersection of modern Belarus, Poland and Western Ukraine, meaning that most of Ukraine and Russia were inhabited by other races. In spite of being a very populous nation for the time, they were remarkably homogeneous — being described by contemporary sources to the level of skin hue and eye color.
Byzantine historian Procopius, writing in the year 542, described them as “neither very fair or blond, nor do they incline entirely to the dark type, but they are all slightly ruddy in color.” Six centuries later, Saxon chronicler Helmold described them in similar terms: “These men have blue eyes, ruddy faces, and long hair.” Even with regards to body shape they were rather uniform, being tall and strong according to Procopius’s account, while emperor Maurice was so enchanted by stories of the Slavs that he invited a delegation, and, upon being amazed by their “height and mighty stature” he sent them onward to other parts of the Empire. Such descriptions don’t quite correspond to modern Slavic incarnations like Volodymyr Zelensky or Vladimir Putin — rather it is the American president who’s a closer match, along with his son and First Lurch Barron Trump.
Some of the sources on early Slavs refer to a people known as the Venedi, considered by most modern scholars to be synonymous with the Slavs on account of similar characteristics and the lexical conservation (as an infix) within names such like Slovenia or the archaic Sklavonia. Indeed, the Germans have traditionally referred to neighboring Slavs as Wends, although the name may go all the way back to proto-Indo-Europeans. The ancient region of Veneto in Northern Italy, bordering Slovenia, spoke a language probably medial to Celtic and Italic. Its capital city, Venice, is pronounced in the local dialect almost exactly like the city of Vinnytsia in Western Ukraine. Between the ancient scribes Tacitus, Ptolemy and Pliny the Elder, the Venedi were being located at both the Adriatic Sea and the Baltic Sea (then called the Venedic Gulf) — thus it is possible that the Balts were the original Venedi, and that Latvian is ultimately cognate with Latin.
Concerning the general demeanor of the early Slavs, some tentative conclusions can be drawn. Their social structure was more individualist than collectivist. They practiced exogamy, much like other circumpolar-descended societies. They were neither sedentary nor fully nomadic, frequently changing their abode since they engaged in farming, beekeeping and craftsmanship, but also hunting and herding. They were so de-centralized that they were not governed by a ruler, but, as Procopius describes: “from ancient times [they] have lived in [militaristic] democracy, and consequently everything which involves their welfare, whether for good or for ill, is referred to the people.” This is consistent with modern Slavic languages, which lack endemic words beyond the rank of chief — titles like king, queen, prince, viceroy, earl or baron all have foreign etymologies.
Such natural egalitarian scruples and the complete lack of stratification seems to have been a natural adaptation to that part of Europe, so much so that the ancient Dorians of the Danubian Basin may have evolved in similar conditions before going on to invade Pelasgic Greece, founding the militaristic city-states of Sparta, Athens and Corinth, and eventually creating civil democracy. The author of the sixth century work Strategikon makes it clear that so long as the Slavs did not unite under a single ruler, they would not be a threat, adding: “the Sklaveni and Antes were both independent, absolutely refused to be enslaved or governed, least of all in their own land.” Succeeding history would not be favorable to Slavic proto-libertarian absolutism, since it is well known from whence Western languages derived their word for slave. The early Slavs would be turning in their grave if it wasn’t for the fact that they practiced cremation.
The early signs of Slavic hardheadedness, albeit within a high-trust environment, were documented in accounts of their primeval culture. Thieves were either strangled or exiled, while those guilty of fornication were executed with no grounds for appeal. According to the Strategikon: “Their women are more sensitive than any others in the world. When, for example, their husband dies, many look upon it as their own death and freely smother themselves, not wanting to continue their lives as widows.” All in all, the Slavs were probably more pragmatic than the exaggerated stereotypes attributed to them by sixth-century Roman military manuals.
The fondness that the Slavs had for agrarian productivity, trade and isolationism (conflict avoidance) is likely what led to the expansion of the Slavic realm. This involved the integration of various peoples who were disillusioned by the collapse of the great political organizations on the fringes of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, this instance of Slavicization involved people who were genetically if not linguistically similar, since for millennia Eastern Europe was overwhelmingly populated by highly related Indo-Europeans — foremostly Celts, Germanics and Scythians.
Even after Germanics came to dominate Scandinavia and Western Europe, groups like the Gepids, Getae and Ostrogoths held large swathes of territory in the East. The prime stretch of real estate between the Dniester and Don Rivers (modern Ukraine) was ensconced by the Goths for centuries, hence the semantic linkage to the Danish ethnonym. The connection of the Swedes to Kievan Rus and the Volga River Vikings is well known, but it’s worth revisiting a famous account by tenth-century Arab diplomat Ibn Fadlan of those Rus he encountered: “I have never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blond and ruddy…“ Thus the Vikings seemed to be of the same genetic stock as the original Slavs, albeit with distinct cultural practices like extensive tattooing, liberal fornication and selling their own into slavery. There was evidently some bilateral cultural exchange, since the modern Swedish language has several words of Slavic origin, typically to do with goods: kvarg (cheese), lök (onion), räka (shrimp), torg (market), humle (hops); but also male names like Sven/Svante and the personal pronoun Jag. Some adjective suffixes in the Scandinavian languages are strikingly different from German, for example words like þýska, svenska, norsk, dansk… — standard Slavic grammar that is common not only in Slavic surnames but in cities like Donetsk, Lugansk and Petrovsk.
Regarding the other great racial contingent in Eastern Europe throughout antiquity, the Scythians, these were largely nomadic nations who spoke Iranic languages. The more prominent among them included the Sarmati, Alani, Roxolani, Budini and Massagetae — the latter of which seem to have been Goths by origin (Getae). In spite of modern analogues, Iranic speakers north of the Caucuses did not share the sort of phenotype of an ayatollah or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; rather they were similar if not fairer than the Slavs.
Herodotus described the Budini as being “mightily blue-eyed and ruddy” with long manes of “bright red hair.” Ammianus Marcellinus wrote of the Alani that nearly all were “of great stature and beauty, their hair generally blond.” Bishop Gregory of Nyssa described the Scythians as fair-skinned and blond-haired, while Greek physician Galen attributed reddish hair to Sarmatians, Illyrians and most northern peoples. According to Herodotus, even the Iranic speakers south of the Caucasus, namely the Persians of the fifth century BC, were hardly distinguishable from Greeks in phenotype. This was to change, though they did preserve their languages whereas their kin north of the Caucasus were almost entirely assimilated — Slavic identity being the greatest contributor. Very few words of this extinct language are known, although one key word that was discovered in an old Hungarian document was don/dan, meaning water, hence the origin of Ukraine’s river names, and, indirectly, the Danes.
So while the Slavs focused on farming and mercantile activities, the Scythians were either too warlike for their own good, or were simply outcompeted as stubborn nomads in a changing landscape. There was only so many times that they could circle the wagons to survive rather than prosper. Similarly, the Germanic presence in Eastern Europe waned on account of too much warfare, often with each other, or through emigration and assimilation with those more numerous (Slavs) or war-hardened (Asiatics).
On the question of what happened to the distinctive ruddiness of the Slavs, and to a lesser extent the Scandinavians, a Polish academic has argued that the uniform phenotype of the Slavs began to change in the thirteenth century, due to “ongoing micro evolutionary processes, migration, epidemics, wars and widespread colonization.” It is significant that the Roman and Arab sources originally insisted on the word ruddy, instead of tawny or olive, which they would have been familiar with in the Mediterranean region. Authentic ruddiness lives on in only a small minority of whites, e.g. folks like Tucker Carlson, whose Swedish ancestors would not have been permitted to migrate to the United States if Benjamin Franklin had his way. As for the Slavs, finally developing social stratification and a nobility led to the same evolutionary pressures as with all status-based cultures. But in addition to sexual selection for pallidness operating in one direction, Slavs experience admixture with swarthy phenotypes operating in the other.
Perhaps the first authentically oriental nation to bypass the unformidable Ural Mountains that guarded Europe were the Huns. They were either Turkic, Mongolic or Tungusic, as can be deduced from Roman historian Jordanes’s depiction of an ancient tale of White flight: “Like a whirlwind of nations they swept across the great swamp and at once fell upon [those] who bordered on that part of Skithia [Scythia]… They made their foes flee in horror because their swarthy aspect was fearful, and they had, if I may call it so, a sort of shapeless lump, not a head, with pin-holes rather than eyes.”
In the space of a couple generations, the Huns amassed huge tracts of territory and many subject nations, culminating in the empire of Attila. The Scourge of God, as he was dubbed, accrued about 70 wives, including the Gothic beauty Ildico, who would fatefully be his last. Since the Slavs in this time were still reposed in their arboreal and estuary retreats, they largely escaped Hunnic depredation; however, they would eventually absorb the descendants of those who were. The Huns were defeated and disappeared from maps in the fifth century, however some fled back to the Pontic steppe (Ukraine) and rebranded or joined forces with other Asian arrivals like the Avars, Bolgars, Hunuguri and Sabiri.
The Avars never had an iconic leader like Attila, however in some respects their impact was more enduring. From their base on the Great Hungarian plain, they incrementally conquered all those in their periphery, leveraging their military advantage against those perhaps more interested in peaceful agrarianism. They pitted various kings and tribes against each other, backing the right factions and acquiring the right subjects at the right time. It was during the Avar period that the role of some Slavs began to change, whether consensual or not remains disputed. The chronicler Fredegar recalled that under Avar suzerainty the Slavs did the bulk of the fighting for little reward, paid tributes, and suffered much mistreatment, including sexual exploitation of Slavic women for whom even the mixed progeny came to hate, leading to a rebellion. On the other hand, archeological evidence from the seventh century points to a mixed Slavic-Avar material culture, suggesting a peaceful and harmonious relationship between the Avar aristocracy and Slavic peasants, with potential upward mobility for Slavs. The Byzantines certainly didn’t view the Slavs as helpless subordinates, as John of Ephesus writes:
…the invasion of an accursed people, called Sklavonians, who overran the whole of Greece … and all Thrace … devastated and burnt … reduced the people to slavery … and settled in it by main force … and even to this day, being the year 895 [584 AD] … live in peace in the Roman territories, free from anxiety and fear … and they have grown rich in gold and silver, and herds of horses … and have learnt to fight better than the Romans, though at first they were but rude savages, who did not venture to shew themselves outside the woods and the coverts of the trees; and as for arms, they did not even know what they were, with the exception of two or three javelins or darts.”
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John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History, Part III, Book 6
Thus, under the tutelage of the Avars, the Slavs became conquerors on a large scale, with some contemporary accounts even omitting mention of the Avars by name. At any rate, the large populations of the Slavs must at some point correspond to culpability in conquering. By 602 AD the Romans had essentially given up; the Danube Frontier becoming an open border and likely leading to more Slavs settling territories from the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea — giving birth to the South Slavic polities. In the next few hundred years the Avars would eventually be assimilated by the Hungarians, Croats and Franks (Austrians and Slovenes).
By the tenth century, it was known to Slavs and distant foreigners alike that the Slavs were no longer a homogeneous race. Arab traveler Masudi wrote that “…the Walitaba [Volhynians] are the original, pure-blooded Slavs, the most highly honored and take precedence over all the other branches of the race.” Volhynia is a region in northwest Ukraine that corresponds to the hypothesized Slavic homeland. However, even this Slavic heartland was soon to be pressed upon by an effective backlog of Altaic nations piling up on the Pontic-Caspian steppe. These include the Khazars, whose empire covered most of Ukraine and lasted four centuries, the Magyars, the Pechenegs, and the Cumans, whose empire stretched from Serbia to the Urals. However, after weathering almost a millennium of Turks and company blowing in from the East, the worst was still to come in the form of the Mongols.
The Mongols were the ultimate masters of cavalry, archery, psychological warfare, and leveraging their numbers. They had already massacred countless Indo-Europeans in Central Asia, endemic to that region as they were. The city of Herat was considered by Rumi to be the Pearl of the Khorasan, but to the Mongols it was merely a city deserving punishment for having resisted Mongol rule and so all 2.4 million residents were beheaded, according to one contemporary testimony. Similar fates befell Merv and Neyshabur. Upon reaching Europe in the thirteenth century, they had many Altaic nations under their yoke, and so the continent would be introduced to the Tatars, Uyghurs, Manchurians and others. Both Kiev and Moscow fell, thus the flaxen-haired remnants of the Scythians and Goths were conquered by the Golden Horde. Slavs bore the brunt of the Mongol onslaught.
A famous remark attributed to Hulagu Khan (the grandson of Genghis Khan) was the promise that Mongol horses would wash their hooves in the “final sea” — likely referring to the Atlantic. They may well have delivered on that prophecy had the petty formality of Ogedei Khan’s death not required them to return home and elect a new leader. Ironically, it would be the Slavs who would go on to achieve Hulagu’s prophecy in reverse, as the Russian Empire eventually reached the frozen shores of the Bering and yonder. This historical parable reminds me somewhat of a joke that cropped up three years ago in response to the special military operation, in which Russia’s tourism board launched the new slogan: Come visit Russia before Russia visits you.
The Eurasian landmass — gifted in size as it is and blandished further by the Mercator projection — has kept certain secrets regarding the nature of migrations and conquests. The vast Eurasian steppe linking Pannonia and Manchuria became a de facto highway for roving horsemen, with free fuel available most of the year. Why exactly this Route 66 of raping and pillaging was only traversed in one direction is a matter largely ignored by anthropologists. Retired Oxford archeologist Barry Cunliffe implicates a transcontinental weather gradient as being the cajoling entropy. More perplexing still is the fact that the first people to domesticate the horse were the Indo-Europeans north of the Caucuses, roughly 4,200 years ago. At least from this perspective, Eurasia enjoyed a grace period of a couple millennia before large hordes began wreaking havoc over long distances. Whites may have been ahead of the curve, but they were ultimately outdone by the slope.
This essay has focused on the history and ethnography of Eastern Europe from antiquity to the Middle Ages in order to provide a solid framework for exploring contemporary Slavic identity. For those addled by excessive names, dates and territories mentioned, I would recommend the new online 3D map resource timemap.org, which efficiently conveys the richness and dynamism of the Old World in particular. The added third dimension is time, and seamless scrolling is possible in different modes. It was thanks to this resource that I noticed that the current frontline in Ukraine almost perfectly matches the borders of several khaganates over a period of six non-consecutive centuries. In my next piece, I intend to reprise my role not only as border sentinel but as a neutral observer of Russo-Ukrainian affairs and human geography from a modern perspective.
Notes
(550s). History of Wars vii, 14
(1120). Chronica Slavorum
(550s). History of Wars vii, 22—30
Curta, Florin. (2001). The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c. 500—700 (pp. 71, 320, 321). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
(500s). Strategikon ix, 4
Kobyliński, Zbigniew. (2005). The Slavs. The New Cambridge Medieval History, 524—544
Jones, Gwyn. (1973). A History of the Vikings. Oxford University Press
(400s BC). Inquiries Book, 4
Marcellinus, Ammianus. (300s). Res Gestae XXXI, 2-21
(400s BC). Histories Book, 7
Stanaszek, Łukasz Maurycy. (2001). Fenotyp dawnych Słowian (VI—X w.). Światowit, 3 (44)/Fasc.B, 205-212
(500s). Getica, 126-127
(600s). Chron. iv, 48
Kobyliński, Zbigniew. (2005). The Slavs (p. 537). The New Cambridge Medieval History, 524—544
Fine, John Van Antwerp Jr. (1991). The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press
Porphyrogenitus, Constantine. De Administrando Imperio, 30
Schutz, Herbert. (2004). The Carolingians in Central Europe, Their History, Arts, and Architecture: A Cultural History of Central Europe, 750—900 (p. 61). Brill
Masudi, Abd al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Husayn (943). The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Precious Gems
Juvayni, Ala Ad Din Ata Malik. (1200s). The History of The World Conqueror
