Vladimir Putin, the creator of the worst war of this century, believes that an ancient priestly chronicle blesses endless bloodshed. The truth about that work of art, “The Tale of Bygone Summers,” helps us see the truth about Russia’s war. Its hero, the Danish chieftain Rurik, leads us to another work of art—Shakespeare’s Hamlet. We will need art to understand the tragedy, because Putin’s meeting with Donald Trump earlier this month in Alaska cannot be understood, as we would like to believe, in terms of comforting concepts like national interest.
Putin is a cynical man, the founder of the post-truth politics in which Trump thrives. However, at the bottom of the deepest cynicism often lies a very naive idea. In Putin’s case, it is the idea that Russia has an ancient, continuous and sacred past that includes Ukraine. “History,” a collection compiled by Kievan monks in the Middle Ages, has become a kind of prophecy for him.
In a text he wrote before the invasion and in a lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson last year, Putin presents the life of Rurik as the starting point of a sacred history in which Russia must invade Ukraine. In Alaska, Putin described Ukrainians as a “brotherly people” with “the same roots” – who must violently rid themselves of their own delusion that they are a separate people.
What History does offer is a depiction of the appearance of Scandinavians in the eastern Baltic in the early Middle Ages. One of the early protagonists is Rurik in the 862th century. A record from XNUMX states that the Slavs asked to be ruled by Scandinavians. This unlikely plot seems to have been borrowed from the Scandinavian sagas, as the Danes and Swedes liked to justify their plundering by “invitations” from the local population.
A Dane named Rurik probably did indeed pacify the lands in the eastern Baltic. But he never went to Kiev, a thousand miles from where he could have landed, nor were his men there. It would be another century before Scandinavians began to settle Kiev. Nevertheless, nothing that happened in medieval eastern Europe obliges future states to go to war with each other a thousand years later—any more than, say, Carolingian history today requires France to invade Belgium, or Mayan history requires Mexico to invade Guatemala.
The story of Rurik is important for another reason: as a lesson in the mythical politics of fictional dynasties. The monks of Kiev, writing centuries later in the state we know as Kievan Rus, wanted to establish that their patrons were the inheritors of a glorious tradition. So they made Rurik a hero, let him stay in the Baltic region, gave him a biblically long life, had him father a child on his deathbed, and then had that child smuggled into Kiev as his heir. We know for a fact that this did not happen. The math doesn’t add up, and the archaeological evidence is clear.
The monks used the distant past to support their rulers of the time, to show that they were more important than their rivals in the Baltic region. Eight hundred years later, Putin uses their text, History, to do the same, but on a much grander scale. According to this interpretation, Moscow must rule Kiev - even though Moscow did not exist at the time of the 9th-century events the chronicle describes.
Moscow became the center of power under the Mongols. After Rurik's time, other Scandinavians took control of Kiev. Their monks wrote the Histories to try to justify their supremacy. This state, the kingdom of Kievan Rus', fell apart after the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. It was largely incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The new city of Moscow, then in the northeastern region of Rus', fell under the rule of the khans, who elected local leaders to collect taxes on their behalf.
After several hundred years of this order, the rulers of Moscow, freeing themselves from Mongol rule, decided they wanted a prouder story about their past. So they went back about 700 years, pulled Rurik out of History, and invented the Rurikovich dynasty. When Peter the Great founded the Russian Empire in 1721, he went even further back and appropriated the Scandinavian name Rus. New states seek myths of ancient origins, as Peter (and now Putin) clearly demonstrate.
The Danish prince Rurik did not found Kievan Rus' or any other state; even if he had, it would be absurd to imagine that its medieval history justifies the bombs that are falling on Ukrainian cities today. His legend teaches us about the fictions of power and leads us to another legend - about the mechanisms of power itself.
We learn much more about a similar Rurik in the medieval collection “Gesta Danorum” (Deeds of the Danes), written by Saxo Grammaticus in the late 12th century. Scholars have argued for a century whether this is the same person; it seems likely that it is, although both sources about his life contain elements of legend. Here, Rurik Dane is a pagan Viking, “the scourge of Christianity.” Having inherited lands from his father in the eastern Baltic, he sailed to collect tribute. In this account, the Slavs lived very close to the Baltic Sea. The Gesta Danorum agrees with the History on one basic point: a Dane ruling the Slavs. At that time and in that area, this was not unusual. Rurik then returned home. He is recorded as raiding the coasts or ruling parts of what is now the Dutch and German coasts during the 870s.
Rurik's family history, as told by Saxo, takes us into a familiar mythical landscape. Rurik's career, according to Saxo, began when his father killed the god Odin's favorite son, and was then avenged by another of Odin's sons. After his father's death, Rurik had his own Baltic adventure of collecting tribute. While in the Histories he remained in the Baltic region to have a useful son on his deathbed, in the Gesta Danorum he returns to Denmark with a daughter named Geruta.
As a Danish prince, according to Saxo, Rurik oversaw the rivalry between two chieftains, the brothers Feng and Orwendil. Impressed by Orwendil's conquests, Rurik gave him Geruta as a wife. Feng then, out of jealousy, killed his brother and married Geruta himself. All this was watched by Orwendil's son - Rurik's grandson. The young man feigned madness to avoid being killed by his uncle and plotted revenge. His name was Amlet. Shakespeare called him Hamlet.
Rurik stands behind the curtain of Shakespeare's greatest play. But he does not stand at the beginning of Russian statehood. Putin, however, is clearly invested in his version of the Eastern European past and in the idea that war is necessary, so to speak, to make that version true. One can believe in something unreal and then put it into practice, drawing others into a violent transformation. Hannah Arendt called this totalitarianism.
It may seem crazy to claim that a country should be conquered because of a non-existent ethnos misread from a shaky story in ancient History, in which cities are conquered by babies, wars are decided by wrestling matches, and a ruler dies because of a prophecy about a horse. Or perhaps it is politics that transforms the world, through death and destruction, to suit art.
More than a century ago, at a time when the Russian Empire canonized the story of Rurik, Ukrainian thinkers were taking a different path. They were inventing social history (Mykhailo Hrushevsky), explaining the necessity of cross-cultural encounter for self-realization (Ivan Franko) and state-building (Vyacheslav Lipinsky), and appropriating elements of the classical past of Scythia and Greece (Lesya Ukrainka). These authors are experiencing a renaissance today. While the humanities are flourishing in war-torn Ukraine, while Ukrainians are publishing innovative global histories, the aggressor state is implementing extreme forms of history politics, imposing an official view of an eternal, pristine Russia.
If a dictator like Putin can claim that the past is “frozen” at some point, then anything that happened at any other time becomes metaphysically wrong and subject to violent punishment. If it were true that Ukraine belongs to Russia in the 2020s because a Russian dictator knows the legend of a Viking from the 860s, then the tens of millions of people who actually live there would have no say in their own identity: they would have no choice but to accept executions, torture, child abductions.
Medieval metaphysics meets post-truth propaganda. When Putin’s war began, back in 2014, the claim to ancient rights coincided with a surge in social media activity: obfuscating Russia’s invasion of Crimea and other parts of southern and southeastern Ukraine, then supporting Brexit, then Trump’s presidential campaign. Putin’s advisor Vladislav Surkov was largely responsible for shifting Russian politics toward post-truth, both domestically and internationally: toward a model in which one state can invade another based on a fairy tale from the past, deny it is doing so using sophisticated social media methods in the present, and achieve considerable success in the process.
That success was very real. The Obama administration’s response to the Russian invasion in 2014 was hesitant and insufficient. Brexit really happened. Trump was elected president. Today, we often forget that the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually began more than a decade ago, and that it also included the Donbas. This loss of memory, a result of hybrid warfare, has consequences for the future. Trump presents the Donbas as something that Ukraine could simply cede, even though the parts it still holds are its defensive lines and fortress cities, containing important natural resources, and in reality Russia has been trying to conquer the region for eleven and a half years.
According to Putin's interpretation of the ancient work, Moscow must rule Kiev - even though Moscow did not exist at the time of the 9th-century events the chronicle describes.
Hamlet leads us to a very specific weakness of American policy under Trump. Surkov, Putin’s ideologue in the first invasion, was obsessed with the drama. In his reports from Moscow at the time, Peter Pomerantsev described a conversation with a literature professor about the plot of the play. To her, she said, the plot was crystal clear: Norway had infiltrated its agents within the Danish elite, Hamlet had been manipulated into madness to destabilize the Danish court, and a coup by the Norwegian Prince Fortinbras had been planned from the start.
How can a weaker state waging war in Eastern Europe weaken a stronger state? In Shakespeare's play, Norway claims to be fighting Poland, but along the way it manages to take over Denmark - a much stronger state that had recently defeated it. This paranoid (and perhaps accurate) interpretation offered by Pomerantseva's interlocutor provides a kind of hint.
Russia is now engaged in a war in Eastern Europe. And, in connection with that war, it dominates the court of its more powerful rival, the United States. Under Trump, Putin no longer has to fear condemnation for his illegal invasion and Russia’s numerous war crimes. Standard deterrents to future wars—such as trials, reparations, and troop deployments—have been rejected out of hand, with no return. U.S. military aid to Ukraine has been cut off twice and, by all accounts, will simply be allowed to run dry.
Fortinbras is a more likeable character than Putin, and Trump, unlike Hamlet, seems to care nothing for his own country. But even villains can have tragic flaws, and Trump's is vanity. Judging by the press conference in Anchorage, Putin understands this very well.
The trap Trump fell into was set back in 2016, when the Kremlin made a concerted effort to help his presidential campaign and defeat Hillary Clinton. Americans are suppressing this realization: Trump taught his supporters to use the word “fraud” while intimidating the media. We have short-term memories anyway, and we don’t believe that foreigners can fool us so easily.
But Russian politics were very real—and both Putin and Trump knew it. At a “press conference” without a single question, Putin persisted with his myths about the past, and then Trump spoke of his indignation that people remembered that Russia helped him in his 2016 presidential campaign. That never happened, Trump said, and believing otherwise was the result of a “deception” that, unfortunately for him, prevented his “fantastic relationship” with Putin from guiding his policies.
Trump, from the Kremlin’s perspective, has been a man of Russia from the start. The Kremlin had every reason to believe, a decade ago, that a Trump presidency would be in their interest—as a means to bring chaos and weakness to the United States. The Russian official press made it clear in 2024 that Trump was their great hope for victory in Ukraine. Whatever other lures Russia might have, the mere fact of his previous support, combined with his personal vanity, is enough. Someone else might have handled the issue differently: OK, they supported me, but that doesn’t matter, I would have won anyway; and now that I have won, I will show Russia how independent I am.
Like Putin, Trump is a very cynical man, a post-truth politician. And at the heart of his cynicism is a very naive idea: that he is, in fact, entirely his own. Trump’s need to constantly insist that Russia never supported him actually empowers the Russians who did. Putin can only nod: yes, it was all a hoax. And then Trump and Putin can bond over the terrible things they were both supposedly subjected to. The spotlight of martyrdom is reserved for Trump and Putin, given all that “we” – as Trump said in Anchorage – have endured together. The Ukrainians are ignored. In Alaska, the suffering of hundreds of thousands of wounded and killed is not mentioned at all.
Putin’s view of Ukraine is madness, but there is method to it. The claim that Ukraine is a “brotherly nation,” as Putin said in Alaska, is both an evocation of the old story of Rurik and a claim to power: I, a warlord and dictator, can make a lie the truth by killing people, by eliminating evidence to the contrary. Trump does not need to understand this mystique to find solace in it. Russia is an ancient nation, a great power; it must be allowed to do as it pleases. Trump can tell himself and us that this is simply the nature of the world, not the result of subservient American policy, nor the perverse work of an American president trapped by his own vanity. In Alaska, the two stories have come together, in full view of everyone.
Perhaps this is not surprising, since the story of Hamlet and the story of Rurik are in fact one and the same story. Without the Scandinavian sagas, without the priestly chroniclers in Denmark and Kiev, we would not have Shakespeare's famous drama, and the Russians would be deprived of their legend of origin. We must know art to understand the politics of mythical dynasties and confusing plots. To understand the stories is to see how deception and self-deception began the war, and now prolong and worsen it.
Neither “A Tale of Bygone Years” nor “Hamlet” record the facts in the way we might imagine a press conference between two presidents in Anchorage. But “preparation is the key to everything.” Art prepares us to see: for example, that the entanglement of two people is more important than the politics we would like to see, and that the country is rotting from within.
The author teaches history at the Munk School in Toronto.
The text is taken from "Financial Times"
Translation: NB
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