Quotes About Rus

Towards the end of the fifteenth century, invaded from the east in its own turn, the Golden Horde fell apart, and the northern princes stopped paying tribute and ruled independently again. But by then the habit of violent, Asiatic-style despotism was there to stay. Scratch a Russian, as the saying goes, and you find a Tatar. Whereas northern Rus fell to the Horde, southern Rus went to the Lithuanians.

The best surviving key to Rus greatness is Kiev's Santa Sofia Cathedral, built in 1037 by one of the greatest Riurik princes, Prince Yaroslav the Wise. From the outside it looks much like any other baroque Ukrainian church, its original shallow Greek domes and brick walls long covered in gilt and plaster. But inside it breathes the splendid austerity of Byzantium.

By choosing Christianity rather than Islam, Volodymyr cast Rus's ambitions for ever in Europe rather than Asia, and by taking Christianity from Byzantium rather than Rome he bound the future Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians together in Orthodoxy, fatally dividing them from their Catholic neighbours the Poles.

In 1362 a Lithuanian army under Grand Duke Algirdas took Kiev, and the following year it inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mongols at the battle of Blue Waters in the bend of the Dnieper. The Lithuanian Grand Duchy now occupied roughly half the territory of old Rus, extending all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

In 1299 Kiev lost its religious status too, when the Metropolitan, Rus's senior churchman, transferred his see to Vladimir, and thence, a few decades later, to Moscow.

Thus the heirs of Rus are not the Ukrainians, with their funny language and quaint provincial ways, but the far more successful Russians themselves.

The Chuds, the Slavs, and the Krivchians then said to the peoples of Rus: "Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us."

Of the Muslim Bulgarians of the Volga the envoys reported there is no gladness among them; only sorrow and a great stench, and that their religion was undesirable due to its taboo against alcoholic beverages and pork; supposedly, Vladimir observed on that occasion: "Drinking is the joy of the Rus.

The risen Christ! Once more faith is upon us, a jubilant brief keening with respite: Obedience, bitter joy, the elements, clouds, winds, louvres where the bell makes its wild mouths: Holy Rus – into the rain's horizons, peacock-dyed tail feathers of storm, so it goes on.

Rus, dancing alongside Roza like a monstrous, bedraggled pony.

The Vikings... establishing themselves as the Rus, a word that is thought to come from an old Norse term, rods, meaning "men in row". Islamic sources say they then subjugated the Slavic peoples, who were traded as slaves along a network that reached across the Black Sea as far as Islamic Baghdad. ("Slav" possibly comes from their being traded as slaves by the Rus).

Vladimir allegedly noting that "drinking is the joy of all Rus'. We cannot exist without that pleasure." (Some stereotypes have a long pedigree, it seems.)