Story of the Slavs

From the early Indo-Europeans to the Soviet Union

What stirs you, voices from far away?

Why do you threaten Russia with curses?

What outrages you? The strife in Lithuania?

Ignore it - it is strife between Slavs

It is an old, domestic strife already set by fate

It is a question which you cannot resolve

Among each other have long

struggled the tribes

More than once one bent in a storm

Sometimes us, other times others

Who will endure in this unequal strife?

The proud Pole, or the true Russian?

Will the Slavic streams flow into the Russian sea?

Or will they dry up? That is the question.

- Alexander Pushkin

Thirty centuries before the birth of Jesus, Europe was born again. Like all births, it was terrible in both agony and bloodshed. The northern realms of Old Europe, in decay for six centuries, were overthrown by invaders from the east. Those invaders, now called the Corded Ware culture or the Indo-Europeans, were only halted at the Rhine. Their immensely destructive invasions compounded the demographic impact of the plagues and climate shifts of previous centuries upon their predecessors, the Early European Farmers (EEFs). Thus when the Indo-European conquerors mixed with the surviving EEFs, the blood of the former predominated over the blood of the latter in the succeeding generations. The latter was nonetheless not completely drained, and comprised a quarter to a third of the ancestry of succeeding generations. Most of that ancestry was derived from EEF women.

The Indo-Europeans were even by the standards of their time a barbarian people. Like all barbarians, they were quick to quarrel and difficult to corral. Within decades of their conquests the polity or polities which they had formed fragmented into antagonistic successors. Those successors, marrying among themselves and gradually varying their extant crafts are distinguishable in the archaeological record and in their DNA. Thus we know that the branch of Indo-Europeans which seized power in northern Germany, the Low Countries, and southern Scandinavia was that which would eventually conquer the Atlantic fringe of Europe. The branch which ruled southern Germany and Czechia was comprised of the ancestors of the Italics and the Celts. The Indo-Europeans who would eventually become known as the Germanic peoples mixed with the diverse hunter-gatherers of the eastern Baltic.

The branch of the Indo-Europeans which the Iranians, the Slavs, the Aryans, and the Balts count as ancestors drove east. They stormed across the Middle Dnieper and followed its tributaries into the heart of modern Russia. There, they followed the Volga and the Kama, overrunning the racially alien hunter-gatherer tribes who had reigned there for millennia. Their stone axes and superior ability to exploit the local ecologies with crops and cattle meant that their defeats were ephemeral and their victories permanent. They could feed larger populations than their neighbors, so multiplied rapidly and inevitably triumphed over the span of generations. They destroyed most and exiled a few of the hunter-gatherers. Those few exiles would eke out a harsh existence for another millennium in the Arctic, where they would eventually be overrun by the predecessors of the Saami. Today, those hunter-gatherers comprise a small amount of Saami ancestry.

The eastern Indo-Europeans too turned inwards once they could no longer expand outwards. The steppe lands to the south and east were ruled by other fierce Indo-European tribes derived from the Yamnaya culture who spoke languages ancestral to Greek, Toharian, and Armenian. The north was too cold for their agropastoral way of life. Crops and cattle both fare poorly in frosts. Thus the eastern extreme of their realm, ranging from modern Pskov to the Kama River, fragmented into what archaeologists describe as the Fatyanovo-Balanovo culture. The people of the Fatyanovo-Balanovo culture carried lineages which show that they are the ancestors of the Aryans and the Iranians, but not the Slavs or the Balts.

The western fragment became what archaeologists call the Middle Dnieper Culture, named after the land upon which it settled. The Middle Dnieper River Basin, now north-central Ukraine and southern Belarus, is partly shielded from the steppe tribes by the great forests of the region. The swamps in the region offered both refuges in war and easy access to the rich trade route along the Dnieper in peace. The Dnieper itself and its tributaries are rich in fish, and the surrounding lands fertile. Thus it was a valuable land which offered its inhabitants great wealth

As the Middle Dnieper and Fatyanovo-Balanovo cultures expanded and coalesced in the mid-third millennium, their neighbors to the northwest were hardly stagnant. The ecology of the southeastern Baltic melded Indo-European intruder with hunter-gatherer native. Whereas the Indo-Europeans had emerged as lords or destroyers of non-Indo-European subject populations elsewhere, the nature of life in the eastern Baltic enabled the Baltic Hunter-Gatherers to become a part of the new Indo-European world on far better terms. Heavily reliant on fishing rather than cattle or crops, the Baltic Hunter-Gatherers were not in ecological competition with the Indo-Europeans. Thus polities and marriages were on somewhat equal terms, and the descendants of Baltic Hunter-Gatherers were able rise high in the new Indo-European world. In the southwestern Baltic, the mixed offspring of the Corded Ware Indo-Europeans and the Baltic Hunter-Gatherers in the southeastern Baltic created the Rzucewo culture, stretching along the coast from roughly Danzig to Memel. To the east, in what is nowadays eastern Latvia and northern Belarus, they formed the North Belarusian Culture

The Rzucewo people collided with an expansion of Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans driving east from what are now the Low Countries or northern Germany around 2500 BC, creating the Iwno culture. The Iwno people gradually expanded over the centuries up the Vistula River and its tributaries until the storms of the 19th century BC remade the world again. The Iwno people absorbed the last, isolated EEF holdouts north of the Carpathians in that time.

As conflicts with racial and cultural aliens were superseded by conflicts within the Indo-European world in the middle of the 3rd millennium, the story of the Slavs becomes obscure. It seems that some among the Middle Dnieper Culture were able to take advantage of the Crisis of the Twenty-Third Century and migrate west, mixing with the survivors and creating the Strzyzow culture in what are now southeastern Poland and western Ukraine at the end of the third millennium. The Strzyzow people played a role in forming the Mierzanowice culture, which gradually expanded up the Vistula River Basin in the early 2nd millennium BC until it came into contact with the Iwno people to their north and the Unetice culture to their west.

Iwno Culture in green

The Iwno culture, under influence from the Unetice culture to its west, transformed into the Trzciniec culture around 1800 BC. The Trzciniec culture was like the Bell Beakers a multiethnic phenomenon, but its spread from Poland eastwards was accompanied with a degree of population shift. The descendants of the Rzucewo people, rich in Baltic Hunter-Gatherer ancestry, advanced into southeastern Poland and northwestern Ukraine. There they mixed with the Strzyzow people and formed the Komarov culture, similar in material and way of life but different in blood from the western Trzciniecs.

To the east, in the Middle Dnieper River Basin, all was not well. The invention of the chariot in the preceding centuries enabled the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-Europeans, then reigning to the south of the Urals as the Sintashta culture, to explosively expand both east and west. To the east they destructively carved out the Andronovo culture in Central Asia. To the west they drove into the western steppe (modern Ukraine) and carved out the Srubnaya culture from its preceding Babyne/Multi-Cordoned Ware culture. These conquests set off a chain reaction of violent migrations in both Europe and the Middle East which would dramatically reshape both politics and demography.

The Bronze Age in Belarus. Orange is the Middle Dnieper culture, yellow is the North Belarusian culture. Note the contact zones.

The westwards expansion of the Srubnaya Indo-Iranians appears to have created a vacuum of power and demography, enabling the the eastern Trzciniecs to expand into the territory of the Middle Dnieper culture. There, they mixed with both their predecessors and people migrating southwards along the Dnieper tributaries from the North Belarusian culture, forming the Sosnitsa culture. The Sosnitsa people expanded along the Desna River as far east as the current Russia-Ukrainian border near Sumy, and reigned for six centuries. They were the speakers of what linguists call proto-Balto-Slavic - the ancestral language of the Baltic and Slavic peoples.

Ukraine in the Late Bronze Age, 15th to 13th centuries BC. Sosnitsa culture in light yellow

While the Middle Bronze Age of 1800 to 1200 BC was hardly the most peaceful time, it did see commercial expansion and a the rise of a primitive cosmopolitanism. Religious influences from Central Asia reached over the steppe, across the Dnieper, up the Vistula, and into Scandinavia. Goods were exchanged between the neighboring tribes, and diffused westwards into the Balkans and eastwards into the Urals. The people of the Middle Dnieper possessed goods from all of their neighbors, and indeed dwelt with members of the Steppe Iranian tribes to their south and east.

Around 1200 BC, the ties of trade and politics which had delivered so much prosperity and progress to western Eurasia were suddenly sundered. Droughts in the Levant and Mesopotamia, then the centers of civilization, reduced local surpluses and thus shocked international trade networks. The decline in trade proved deeply destabilizing to Bronze Age states, which required trade to sustain what limited political centralization they possessed. Piracy further pushed the civilized world into a downwards spiral, which quickly became a complete civilizational collapse.

The Bronze Age Collapse devastated much of western Eurasia. Mycenaean Greece collapsed in internal strife. The Celts rampaged across western Europe. The Germanic warlords in Scandinavia fell victim to revolution. The Deccan in India was devastated by northern invaders. Egypt barely endured invasions from the mysterious Sea Peoples. The Finno-Ugrians carved a path in the forests from the Urals to Finland. The Sosnitsa people too were devastated. Exposed to the vicious wars depopulating the Indo-Iranian Srubnaya culture-dominated western steppe to their south and east, they fled into the swamps and vanished from the archaeological record for centuries.

When they Sosnitsa people re-emerged from the swamps after a century or two, they did so as the Lebedovskaya culture (blue diamonds in the above image). The Lebedovskaya people were greatly diminished relative to their Sosnitsa ancestors. In those times, and indeed most times, numbers and organization were strength. Their weakness and in particular the weakness of the Srubnaya Indo-Iranians left a vacuum for others. Those others were the Chernoles culture people, a Balkans people related to the historically attested Thracians and Dacians.

The Chernoles originated in the Stamped Ware Complex of cultures of what is now the Romania. The Stamped Ware peoples were among the earliest adopters of iron metallurgy, enabling them to thrive in the Bronze Age Collapse as they were able to outproduc their neighbors in metal weaponry. Some of the Stamped Ware peoples migrated south to become the Thracians. Others drove to the northwest to become the Dacians. The Chernoles, deriving from eastern parts of the Stamped Ware complex, drove eastwards into the western steppe and its neighboring territories. There, they defeated the western remnants of the Srubnaya Indo-Iranians and overran the southern parts of the Slavic Lebedovskaya people. Mixing with both, their period of hegemony from about 1100 to 900 BC was not to last. Power during the Bronze Age Collapse was almost invariably ephemeral, with the shrinking size of the world limiting elite collaboration and thus state stability.

It was the Cimmerians, a new steppe power from the north Caucasus, who ended the period of Chernoles hegemony on the western steppe around 900 BC. The Cimmerians were a fierce people, but not invincible. The Chernoles heavily fortified their new border with the Cimmerians, allowing them to endure for centuries even if their power was never quite as great as it had been from 1100 to 900 BC. Their fortifications also shielded the peoples behind them - critically the Milograd culture people just to their north.

The Milograd people were the descendants of the northern parts of the preceding Lebedovskaya people which had escaped conquest by the Chernoles during the Bronze Age Collapse. They were the Slavs free of foreign rule, and dwelt up the Dnieper River from the Chernoles. Not as skilled at war or metallurgy as their southern neighbors, they adapted to their military inferiority much as their ancestors had and their descendants would - through periodic retreats into the marshes. Those periodic retreats are archaeologically attested as “bog-forts” - fortified settlements in marshes which were only temporarily occupied. The Milograd Slavs primarily dwelt along rivers with rich soil for their farms, but maintained the bog-forts for refuge in times of war.

The Milograd Slavs endured for centuries in their easily defensible home. The mighty Cimmerians were soon swept off the steppe by a new nomadic empire: that of the Scythians. The Scythians stormed onto the steppe from Central Asia towards the end of the 8th century BC, pushing the Cimmerians into the Middle East, where even their thinned numbers struck such fear that they were remembered in the Bible, the Odyssey, and by Herodotus. The Scythians completely conquered the Chernoles by the end of the 7th century BC, resulting in their political and cultural absorption into the Scythian realm, but the preservation of their ethnic identity.

In the middle of the 5th century BC, Herodotus names the descendants of the Chernoles as the Budini and the Gelonians. The Budini are described by Herodotus as “a great and populous nation, are all blue-gray and red”, while the Gelonians “show no resemblance to the Budini in complexion or general appearance”. Even five centuries after the Chernoles had driven into the steppe from the Balkans, at least some, the Gelonians, maintained their distinctiveness from their Slavic subjects. Both were subject to the Scythians, and fought the Persians during their invasion of the western steppe in 513 BC.

The Scythians would remain dominant in the western steppe for three centuries. The free Slavs to their north periodically migrated to their realm, as attested by Herodotus in his Histories. Some migrated even further. A number of Slavs and Scythians fought in the Battle of Himera in 480 BC Sicily¹. The Neuri, a Slavic tribe known for being the earliest recorded believers in werewolves, apparently fled southwards into their realm in the mid-to-late 6th century so as to live near their fellow Slavs, the Budini. Decades earlier, Slavs had settled among others at the Scythians’ Medvin Fort near modern Kiev. Those Slavs would be responsible for diffusing new techniques in iron metallurgy to their relatives in the north.

Ukraine in the time of the Sarmatians, 3rd to 1st centuries BC. Zarubinets culture in lime green

What had been done before was done again towards the end of the 4th century BC, when the Scythians were defeated on the steppe by a new rising power from the east: the Sarmatians. The defeat of the Scythians at the hands of the Sarmatians left a new power and demographic vacuum in the western steppe for a time. That vacuum was partially filled demographically by the Slavic migrants expanding out of the Middle and Upper Dnieper Basins. The descendants of the Milograd Slavs mixed with the descendants of the partly-Slavic partly-Daco-Thracian Chernoles people, likely as the result of unrecorded conflicts. The product was the Zarubinets culture, which soon expanded to encompass the Upper Bug River Basin in addition to the Middle Dnieper Basin traditionally dominated by their ancestors.

The Zarubinets Slavs thrived and demographically expanded in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, but were not to enjoy either hegemony or happiness. New powers were rising to the northwest. Where once their Trzciniec ancestors had trod in northern Poland trod the Eastern Germanic peoples of the Przeworsk culture. The Przeworsk Germanics traded, warred, and mixed with the Zarubinets Slavs to the degree that Roman writers early in the Common Era such as Tacitus were confused by their ethnic divides.

Whereas the Przeworsk Germanics had perhaps been the equals of the Zarubinets Slavs, the new Wielbark Germanics, the Goths, were to prove their superiors. Storming down the Vistula River Basin in the 1st century AD, the Goths nearly annihilated their predecessors. In the 2nd century, the Goths stormed into the western steppe, devastating both the Sarmatians and the Zarubinets Slavs south of the forest line. There they established their own realm upon what had once been the core of the Zarubinets culture.

The new Gothic kingdom in the western steppe, Oium, included Slavic subjects although they were a peripheral part of the population. The bulk of the surviving Slavic population was again forced northwards across the forest line. There, their diminished descendants formed the Kiev culture. They warred with the Goths, and over the decades lost their eastern territories along the Desna River. It was the old refuge of the marshes and the Upper Dnieper which preserved them from complete destruction.

At the peak of their power the Goths sacked settlements in the Mediterranean by sea, collected tribute from the Balts over land, intervened in Rome’s internal politics, and sent traders as far east as the Ural Mountains. Nonetheless, Gothic rule on the western steppe too would prove ephemeral. The Huns, a fragment of the once-mighty Xiongnu Confederation on the eastern steppe, migrated to the western steppe in the 370s AD. According to Jordanes, the Goths at the time were weakened from a bloody but victorious war against the Slavs. Thus the Huns triumphed over the Goths, driving them to the west and south.

The exodus of the Goths included a number of their Slavic subjects. They were particularly noticeable among the Visigoths who settled in what is now Spain. But by and by large the Slavs stayed home, remaining in their swamps and forests. While this preserved their people, it did not spare them from the convulsions of the 4th and 5th centuries AD. The Huns and their allies raided into the forests, devastating the Slavs and fragmenting their polities.

Eastern Europe from the 3rd to 4th centuries. Slavs in orange, Balts in purple, Finno-Ugrians in green, Huns as brown arrows, Germanics as tan, Romans as golden checkerboard pattern

This fragmentation begins the divergence of the Slavic peoples. Today they have three branches. The first and largest is the East Slavs, comprised of the Russians, the Ukrainians, and the Belarusians. The second is the West Slavs, comprised of the Poles, the Sorbs, the Czechs, and the Slovaks. The third is the South Slavs, comprised of the arc of Slavic peoples from Slovenia in the northwest to the Bulgarians in the southeast of the Balkans. The language ancestral to all currently spoken Slavic languages was proto-Slavic, spoken around the 5th or 6th century prior to the migrations of the Slavic peoples away from the original home in the Middle Dnieper Basin.

The devastation of the Hunnic Invasion, the successor wars following Attila’s death, the Volcanic Winter of 536, and the Fall of Rome depopulated much of Europe. Peoples who numbered in the mere tens of thousands were suddenly seen as fearsome powers by chroniclers, rather than as pathetic refugees as they had been as recently as the fourth century. The depopulation was especially acute in the western steppe, the Pannonian Basin, and the eastern half of the Northern European Plain which had seen the greatest amount of fighting. Archaeologists in eastern Germany and Poland have found little evidence of human activity in the 6th century AD, suggesting that the preceding Germanic population died off or emigrated in near-entirety.

The emptiness was a blessing for the survivors of the previous three centuries of blood and misery. The West Slavs, the ancestors of the Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, and Sorbs; migrated in small numbers into the North European Plain in the middle of the 6th century AD. Free from oppressors and raiders, they multiplied over the decades in their new, far more fertile surroundings. They are detectable in the archaeological record by the end of the 6th century, and referenced as inhabiting the southern Baltic by Theophylact Simocatta at the same time. Intermarriage with Germanic and other groups in the Northern European Plain was minimal at that time, as DNA evidence suggests at least 80% population turnover.

Authenticated Slavic Archaeological Cultures from the 5th to 6th centuries

Things were more complicated for the Slavs who desired to move southwest into the Balkans. The Sclavenes and the Antes, two Slavic confederations, collided with the Eastern Roman Empire along the Lower Danube frontier in the 520s. Firmly establishing themselves in the region, what is nowadays southern Romania, they grew rapidly in population. Like the West Slavs in the North European Plain, their simple agricultural way of life required little external trade, making it ideal for the increasingly fragmented and localized world of the Dark Ages. Unlike the West Slavs, they were hierarchal confederations capable of both organizing and mobilizing considerable numbers of soldiers, so thus vulnerable to elite replacement and political subjugation.

By 550 the Sclavenes and the Antes were powerful enough to march through much of the Balkans and defeat two Eastern Roman armies. The Eastern Romans seem to have come to terms with them in the following years, and offered them settlements in the Balkans in return for military service. These agreements perhaps shored up the Roman position in the Balkans for a brief time, but proved disastrous in the long run.

Power abhors a vacuum, and the western steppe after the collapse of the Hunnic Empire was a vacuum. It was filled by the Avars, the descendants of the Rouran who fled from the eastern steppe to the west after they were defeated by the Gokturks in the 550s. The Avars, extremely capable soldiers with many veterans of the wars in the far east, overran the Slavs in what are now Hungary and Romania. Some of those Slavs chose to remain under the rule of the Avars, but many others fled into the Roman-controlled parts of the Balkans for safety. Thus the first substantial Slavic populations established themselves in the Balkans.

The Avars were a proud people, and like all proud peoples aspired to power. While they racially segregated themselves from their Slavic subjects, they nonetheless had to incorporate them into their armies to contest their neighbors. They warred with the Eastern Romans, further depopulating the Balkans, already devastated by the Plague of Justinian a generation earlier. After inconclusive six wars between 568 and 612, the Avars made a final great gamble against the Eastern Romans, allying with the Sassanid Persians to bring and end to the empire once and for all. The Avars again devastated the Balkans, utilizing large numbers of Slavic soldiers to overrun Roman territories and besiege major cities.

In the end, the Eastern Romans emerged triumphant, defeating both the Avars and the Sassanids. But the Slavs who had migrated across the Danube into the Empire were to remain. They were the second wave of Slavs to the Balkans, and would be followed by a third. The Avars were weakened by their failure to destroy the Eastern Romans in the Last Great War of Antiquity, and were unable to suppress a rebellion by the White Croats, a Slavic tribe which had either settled the western Balkans under the aegis of the Avars or which migrated there after defeating the Avars in a war in the middle of the 7th century. The Bulgars, formerly subjects to the Avars, rebelled in the 630s, creating a realm which would be proclaimed the Bulgarian Empire in 681. The Bulgars, a Turkic people, incorporated many Slavs into their realm, and guided them into the eastern Balkans as they expanded their territory at the expenses of the Eastern Romans in the 7th and 8th centuries.

The East Slavs remained near the original Slavic home, the Middle Dnieper Basin. The tribes to the north of them, the Baltic peoples, had expanded eastwards in the previous millennium, reaching as far east as the Volga. However, the Balts dwelt in environments inhospitable to large populations, so were spread thinly. The Volcanic Winter of 536 and the subsequent Plague of Justinian afflicted the Balts especially severely due to their extreme vulnerability to shorter growing season. The result was a substantial decline in wealth and population in the 6th century, leaving a vacuum for the East Slavs to expand northwards.

Eastern Europe in the 5th & 6th centuries - Slavic groups in orange & yellow, Baltic in purple, German in brown, Avars in grey arrows

The Pskov Long Barrow² Culture was the result of the first Slavic expansion to what is now northwestern Russia, around modern Pskov and Great Novgorod, in the 6th century AD. The way of life from the original homeland of the Slavs was not completely transplanted to the north, but was instead syncretized with that of the Balts and Finnic peoples who had contested the region for the previous thousand years³.

They were not followed for a century and a half. The core of the East Slavs in the Middle Dnieper remained under pressure from the steppe powers such as the Avars and Bulgars who continued to raid and exact tribute. It was not until the late 7th century that the situation to the east changed. The defeat of the Avars at the hands of the Eastern Romans, the migration of the Bulgars to the Balkans, and the disintegration of the Gokturks led to the rise of a new power on the western steppe: the Khazars. The Khazars reigned in the Lower Volga, in what is now southwestern Russia, the north Caucasus, and eastern Ukraine. There, they acted as a great shield for the Slavs from more predatory powers to the east from the end of the 7th century until the beginning of the 9th century.

Once again protected from the predations of steppe nomads, the Slavs multiplied rapidly. The fertile soils of their homeland, among the richest in the world, allowed them, in times of peace, to cultivate abundant crops, sustaining themselves and fostering large families. Herodotus observed that the peoples of the western steppe, such as the Budini, had grown numerous by the 6th century BC after two centuries under Scythian rule, likely for the same reasons that enabled the swift expansion of the East Slavic population under the Khazars’ shadow.

In the 8th century, the growing population of East Slavs expanded both north and west. The Balts of the Dnieper River Basin were largely but not entirely overrun by Slavic migrants from the South. The survival of the Baltic names for hundreds of rivers to the present suggests that they were absorbed rather than destroyed. By the 9th century, the East Slavs were firmly established in the Oka Basin and were pushing down the Volga, coming in contact with and absorbing Finnic groups like the Merya.

The increasing size of the East Slavic population and realm allowed for an increase in social complexity. By the middle of the 9th century, an increase in social complexity was necessary. The Hungarians and the Pechenegs migrated west across the Khazar lands, weakening the Khazars and threatening the East Slavs. The Vikings, previously preferring the Volga trade route through the Khazar realm, shifted their often violent expeditions to the Dnieper trade route through the East Slavic lands. All three of the new powers raided the Slavs.

Feuding amongst each other, the East Slavic tribes were again prey for foreign raiders. However, according to the Tale of Bygone Years, the tribes realized that their internal divides weakened them. As they had perhaps several times in the past, they and several of the Finnic tribes invited a foreign family to rule over them, likely reasoning that as foreigners, that family would have little reason to take sides in their internal struggles. Thus a group of Vikings established themselves in the northern lands of the East Slavs in the 860s.

Over the following decades, descendants of those Vikings, the Rus’ forged a powerful medieval state. They subjugated the remaining East Slavic tribes, raided the Eastern Roman Empire, warred with the Pechenegs, and established their capital at Kiev along their favored trade route. They won trade rights with the Eastern Romans, and eventually converted to Eastern Orthodoxy under Eastern Roman influence. By the 960s the Rus’ were strong enough to war against the Khazars and did so, destroying them utterly.

The Peoples of Eastern Europe at the end of the 9th and beginning of the 10th century

In the 11th century the East Slavs developed a new cereal grain, winter rye, which was able to endure the cold climates of the north considerably better than other crops. This enabled previously uncultivated lands to be populated by East Slavic farmers, expanding their range further to the north and east. The mixed Balto-Finnic-Slavic inhabitants of the northerly parts of Rus’ realm were gradually submerged by "purer” Slavic migrants from the south and west. Areas such as that around modern Moscow which were only under military and political control of the Rus’ in the 11th century became fully-fledged Slavic lands over the course of the 12th. In the 14th century, the Middle Volga and its tributaries became increasingly Slavic, with waves of Slavic migrants absorbing the previous Udmurt population and ensuring that it became part of Russia in the late 15th century.

Kievan Rus’ from the 9th to 12th centuries

The population growth of the East Slavs enabled them to even endure the destructive Mongol Invasions in the 13th century. Rather than being displaced by newer groups as the result of the devastation, the East Slavs actually expanded under the aegis of their new Mongol and eventually Tatar and Lithuanian suzerains. The Mordvin peoples of the Middle Volga, unifying and fortifying in the face of the advancing Rus’, were suddenly shattered by the Mongol Invasion. With their political power shattered, there was nothing which could hold back substantial numbers of East Slavic settlers over the succeeding generations. Today, about two-thirds of the ancestry of the Mordvin peoples comes from East Slavs who settled among them in the Middle Ages.

The Lithuanians had a similar story to the Mordvins. Unifying in the face of German crusaders intent on converting them to Christianity, the increasingly unified Lithuanians found it easiest to expand their realm by conquering the Rus’ principalities of the Dnieper River Basin broken by the Mongol invasions. While the Lithuanians conquered many Rus’ by the sword, those Rus’ managed to conquer all of the Lithuanians by the pen. Lithuanian literacy was rare, and the vast majority of Lithuania’s subjects spoke East Slavic, so the realm’s business was done increasingly in East Slavic. Lithuanians increasingly converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and the entire realm was culturally shifting to the Rus’ east until its union with Poland. After the union with Poland, Lithuanian elites were pulled westwards and gradually Polonized. Nonetheless, East Slavic languages continued to the predominate languages in the Lithuanian realm until its dissolution, and were a court language until 1697.

To the west, the fortunes of the West and South Slavs varied. The Germans, bolstered by a social skeleton in the form of the Catholic Church, developed more quickly than their West Slavic neighbors. They overran what is now eastern Germany by the 12th century, partly displacing and partly absorbing their predecessors. The subsequent Northern Crusades extended German rule to the eastern Baltic, granting them control of the outlets of the major rivers of east-central Europe - the Vistula, the Neman, and the Western Dvina. That control led to the spread of German urban populations across Poland and Czechia through immigration and acculturation. The long term result was that the eastern Germans are today around 40% Slavic in ancestry, while Poles are almost entirely Slavic in ancestry due to the rarity of German acculturation to Polishness. The situation was different in Czechia, where closer German-Czech contacts dated to the creation of the earliest Czech state, Great Moravia, leading to widespread assimilation of Germans in Czechia. Today, the average Czech is only 2/3rds Slavic in ancestry.

In the south, the South Slavs rose as the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire continued its long decline. The Bulgarians forged two empires of their own, while the Serbs forged their own realm of autonomous dukes. These new states were the products of newly forged peoples, peoples descended from a mix of Slavic migrants and their predecessors. Parts of the Byzantine realm, particularly in modern Greece, were inhabited by people with a considerable amount of Slavic ancestry. Even today, certain Greeks are between a quarter and a third Slavic in ancestry.

The Ottomans demographically reshaped the Balkans in the early modern period, but to a lesser degree than they reshaped Anatolia. Their administrative structure was not nearly as capable of extracting wealth from its subjects as the central European states, so they were heavily reliant on cooperation with local religious figures who represented their communities. Ultimately, the Turkish impact on Balkans demography proved as ephemeral. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, most of the Muslims of the Balkans were ethnically cleansed out of most of their territories and driven into Turkey by South Slavic, Greek, and Russian armies.

That experience was shared by the last of the steppe realms, the Crimean Khanate. The Crimean Tatars, long allies of the Ottomans and infamous slavers, depopulated the western steppe in the early modern period, created what was called “The Wild Fields” by contemporary writers. Raiding as far north as Moscow and as far west as central Poland, the Crimean Tatars were gradually pushed back by the Russians over the course of the 17th century. In the 18th century, the Crimean Tatars were finally defeated and their political independence extinguished. After a number of attempts at independence, they were finally broken as a nation by deportations to Central Asia as retaliation for collaboration with the Germans in the Second World War.

The fall of the last steppe empires in the 18th century enabled the East Slavs to colonize the grasslands without the threat of enslavement. In the same way that Americans settled the Great Plains in the late 19th century, millions of East Slavic peasants moved to the new lands for affordable opportunities. Free from starvation more than before, Russia’s population grew quickly. When the Crimean Khanate was subdued, the empire had around 27 million people. By 1800, it had about 36 million. By 1850, it reached 68 million. By 1900, it had 132 million.

The explosive population growth of the Slavic peoples in the 19th and early 20th centuries unsettled German military leaders and policymakers in the two dominant German states, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Those fears played a role in their decisions to wage two wars against Russia and its successor, the Soviet Union, in the first half of the 20th century. Those conflicts ended in decisive Slavic victories. Millions of eastern Germans were ethnically cleansed from Silesia, Prussia, Pomerania, and other lands in eastern Europe where they had dwelt for centuries. The old German-Slavic border of the 11th century AD was restored, erasing eight centuries of German gains.

Even amid devastating costs from war and revolution, the Slavic peoples have demonstrated extraordinary resilience. Today, they rule over European territories more expansive than any they have ever ruled since the beginning of the Northern Crusades. Their story has been one of survival and revival. However, improvements in transportation and communication have rendered obsolete many of the traditional refuges of the Slavs. They only narrowly escaped destruction in 1941 and 1962. If their leaders err, or if fortune turns harshly against them, then Pushkin’s fear may come true. The Slavic streams may dry up.

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In addition to the linked sources, I drew upon the following books - particularly the two Oxford handbooks:

Empires and Barbarians by Peter Heather

Ethnocultural Processes of Central Belarus in Past and Present by Gurko, Rakova, & Kuharonak

The Turks in World History by Carter Findley

Medieval Russia 980-1584 by Janet Martin

A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples by Paul Magocsi

The Urals and Western Siberia in the Bronze and Iron Ages by Lyudmila Koryakova and Andrey Epimahov

The Last Great War of Antiquity by James Howard-Johnson

Germania by Tacitus

The Oxford Handbook of the European Bronze Age

The Oxford Handbook of the European Iron Age

The Histories by Herodotus

The Oxford History of Poland–Lithuania: The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union by Robert Frost

Also many thanks to Twitter writers Halva_Enjoyer, preromanironage, nrken19, & Maptysk for their insights on this complex topic - much of this post was inspired by their tweets.

1. Samples I10943/W0396 and I10949/W040 in the linked paper

2. also known as the Pskovian Long Kurgan Culture

3. their predecessors, a number of hunter-gatherer groups, had been annihilated or absorbed at least two thousand years before