Three men were brought before the court of a German emperor and asked the plainest question there is: who are you? They said they were Rus. They had come by way of the Rus lands, they explained, and had decided to head home by a shorter route. What happened to them nobody knows. It is the first time the name of the Rus appears in a written source, and it appears as an awkward moment at court.
Archaeologist Vasily Novikov, a Candidate of Historical Sciences who leads a detachment of the Joint Gnezdovo Archaeological Expedition, tells the story to show how far from home these men were, and how much effort it took to get anywhere. Why were Scandinavians in the eastern forests at all?
If he is right, the image of the Viking as a raider with an axe fits this corner of Europe badly. The Slavic lands were not a place the Vikings seized. They were a road they kept open, and the state that grew up along it was paid for by the traffic. Next time you read about princes and campaigns in early Rus, picture the inns, tolls and boat repairs behind them.
Start with what raiding there would have got you. In England you walk into an unguarded monastery with gold on the altar and men who won't fight back. In the forest zone of Rus there was nothing like that. What the Slavs had was grain.
And you could not simply conquer them. They lived in scattered farmsteads along the roads, and you can keep taking farmsteads for ever without getting anywhere. The Slavs were also nothing like the gentle ploughmen in white shirts of the popular picture. They were cunning, good at guerrilla war and merciless. Take five villages along a river and by the sixth they have gathered with bows and darts, waiting at a bend. However good your chain mail, they "make a hedgehog out of you".
So the Scandinavians did the sensible thing and traded. The forest offered grain, women, slaves and a trade route they could control, with relations that could be kept on decent terms. The other routes were worse. You could not sail through the Mediterranean to Constantinople, because Arab pirates made it "alarming", and nobody knows what share of ships would have got through. Europe was closed. That left the east.
At first they settled in farmsteads. Archaeologists have dug small settlements with Scandinavian pendants, gold and workshops. Later they came in waves, because the long way round was safer and paid better.
Don't picture one crew a year dragging a boat on their backs. Novikov puts it differently:
This is the Moscow ring road. Not at rush hour, but around five o'clock. It's a constant stream, because without that stream there would be no statehood and no economic basis.
Это МКАД. Не в час пик, но часов в пять. Это постоянный поток, потому что если бы этого потока не было, то и государственность бы не сложилась, не было бы экономической составляющей.
— Vasily Novikov, NauchDok, 44:07
A ring road needs upkeep, and this one had it. Crews arrived on big ships, took them apart and moved on in smaller boats. The boats went by river, over the ice and along ordinary roads, which we forget about because we record them so badly. Written sources of the 11th and 12th centuries already talk about roads, bridges to be laid and tolls to be paid. At Smolensk and Gnezdovo a fleet was assembled. Down at Kyiv and Chernigov the boats were rebuilt again. Novikov compares it to a chain of tyre-fitting shops for ships.
There were hundreds of these places, not two or three. At each one you could stop, sleep, eat, pay and sit out the winter.
Some people tell him the Rus state came from historical "passion", from a drive that seized a people. Novikov's answer is that at the bottom of everything lies the economy: money and food.
Archaeologists elsewhere are looking at the same road. A 2025 paper in Revista Arheologică by Mykhailo Videiko found that finds cluster along the Dnieper route, which matches what chronicles say about traders in the region. His 2024 paper on early medieval weights of a truncated-sphere shape, found in Ukraine, says they may point not only to trade but to taxes and to the spread of the Kyiv princes' power in the 10th and 11th centuries.
Nobody wrote this system down in one place, and Novikov calls it an "economic miracle" that we barely know about, built in the middle of the forest.
