The Locals Came Up With a Face-Saving Tale to Sweeten the Bitterness of the Viking Conquest of Russia
Few historians today give the story that the Slavs had “invited” Rurik to rule them much credence or accept it at face value. It is viewed instead as a face saving invention by Slavs who came to live under Viking domination. The natives preferred to imagine that they had voluntarily invited their foreign rulers, instead of the more bitter reality that they had been conquered and subjugated by them. After he conquered Ladoga around 855, Rurik pushed southwards, and by 862, he was master of what is now Novgorod and its vicinity.
He fortified the town – whose name means “New City” in modern Russian today, but meant “New Fortification” in Medieval Russian – and used it as a base of operations and expansion. He ruled his new realm until his death in 879. Rurik bequeathed his realm to his kinsman Orvar of Holmgard – later Russified into Oleg of Novgorod – and entrusted to him the care of his young son, Igor. Oleg continued Rurik’s expansionist policies, and eventually seized Kiev from his brother Askold, who himself had only recently seized it from the local Slavs.