Prehistory. The first humans arrived in today’s territory of Russia around 40,000 BC. Remains of some of their earliest settlements have been found in the Kostenki archeological site, near Voronezh, and the Sungir site, near Vladimir.

Early Russian History SETTING THE STAGE: At the beginning of the 9th century, the Byzantines regarded the forests north of the Black Sea as a wilderness. In their minds, those forests were inhabited only by “barbarians,” who sometimes made trouble along their borders. They would soon consider these Slavic peoples as fellow Byzantine Christians.

they were called "Ruotsi” or "Russ' hence the name Russians, which came to be applied to the Eastern Slavs. (The Finns were of Mongol origin, not Scandinavian or Slav.) The first of the Viking rulers in Russia was the semi-legendary Ruric, of Swedish or Danish origin. About 862 he founded a principality at Novgorod, and this was soon

its humble beginnings in the early 800s to a great empire in the 1700s. The Roots of Russia Russia was not always as large as it is today. What we now call Russia first began as a series of small villages along the rivers in Eastern Europe. In the early years of the country’s history, various groups of people spread throughout this area.

T he early history of Russia, like those of many countries, is one of migrating peoples and ancient kingdoms. In fact, early Russia was not exactly "Russia," but a collection of cities that gradually coalesced into an empire. I n the early part of the ninth century, as part of the same great movement that brough the Danes to England and the ...

08/03/2017 · This first volume of the Cambridge History of Russia covers the period from early ('Kievan') Rus' to the start of Peter the Great's reign in 1689. It surveys the development of Russia through the Mongol invasions to the expansion of the Muscovite state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and deals with political, social, economic and cultural issues under the …

The Russian’s statehood history starts from the time when numerous Slavic tribes began to inhabit the northern and central parts of the East-European Plain in the 1000 BC. They were settled and lived off hunting, fishing and farming. The ones living in the steppe were engaged in cattle-breeding.