Andrei Artizov; Igor Danilevsky
On the territory of Eastern Europe around the 8th century, about 10 Slavic tribal unions emerged. Later, under the rule of the princes sitting in Kyiv, these tribal unions united into the “Old Russian State,” where the separate tribes merged into a single Old Russian nationality. ; The term “state” is universal and borrowed from related disciplines (political science, sociology). Definitions of the “Old Russian State” or Kievan Rus were developed much later (in the 19th century). The people inhabiting these lands in the 8-12th centuries neither could have known such categories, nor could have identified themselves as citizens of any “state.” No single prince had power – the territories called the “Old Russian State” were rather city-states, each of which conducted its own affairs independently and paid tribute to the most powerful princes/kings.
Thanks to integration processes, people of different tribes gradually formed a consciousness of belonging to a single Russian nationality. ; People identified themselves specifically with their place of residence and activity – the concepts of "state,” "people" and moreover "nation" simply did not exist yet. At most, there were trade and subsequently cultural ties between the tribes. As for the terms “Russian land” and “Rus,” which can be found in the sources, two versions of what was meant by them are accepted: a) in the narrow sense, it is the territories belonging to the basins of the Goryn and Pripyat rivers along the right bank of the Dnieper and a narrow strip on the left bank (V. Kuchkin). As the historian A.V. Nazarenko noted, a large number of coins were found by archaeologists specifically along this line, which gives us reason to believe that the term “Russian land” or “Rus” could refer to a trade route, b) in the broad sense, “Russian lands” also meant those of Bulgaria, Wallachia, Lithuania, etc., and thus it is at least inappropriate to speak of a certain Russian nationality and identity. It is also important to note that in the 8-9th centuries, the term "Rus" in relation to the people who inhabited these lands probably meant not an ethnic group, but a certain social group (tribute collectors or members of the druzhina), and was accepted and used by all Slavs.
As early as in The Primary Chronicle, created in Kyiv at the beginning of the 12th century, the concept of a “Russian language” uniting all East Slavic tribes appears. ; First of all, The Primary Chronicle came down to us in a highly revised form, and we know it from very late editions (14-15th centuries), so it seems not entirely correct to refer to this work as a historical source. The common language for the East Slavic tribes can be considered the language of worship (literary), which spread due to the translation of the Holy Scriptures by the enlightening brothers Cyril and Methodius in the second half of the 9th century. After the adoption of Christianity by the Eastern Slavs, all divine services, and later literary and written works, were conducted and created using this Church Slavonic language. At the same time, historians know practically nothing about the spoken language of the Eastern Slavs. It can be assumed that the different tribes used similar constructions in their speech and could even (with difficulty) understand each other, but it was definitely not a single language.
The academician A. A. Zaliznyak argued that “until about the end of the 13th century, the standard Old Russian language was basically the same across the entire ancient Rus” the linguistic differences between the Slavic tribes did not go beyond the differences between dialects that exist within any modern language. ; The academician A.A. Zaliznyak claimed that in the 11-12th centuries, the oldest Novgorod-Pskov dialect differed from the South Russian dialect in at least 20 essential ways. Meanwhile, the former was similar in a number of ways to the languages of the Baltic Slavs, as well as to the Serbo-Slovenian group of the South Slavs. This was a natural process after the final division of a large group of Slavs into three branches – eastern, western and southern –at the turn of the 10-11th centuries, as a result of which cultural and linguistic differences only increased.
The fragmentation of the lands of Ancient Rus did not dent the idea of its unity, based on a single faith and language. The notion of the territorial community of Rus' was so strong that it survived its collapse. ; The idea about the unity of the Slavs, their cultural and linguistic similarities, begins to form precisely after the collapse of Kievan Rus (V. Yanin).