On 17 July 2003, commemorating the anniversary marking 1,250 years from the founding of Staraya Ladoga, the president of Russia visited the settlement. The press reported that the president did not enter the excavation site near the grave of Oleg because it was full of snakes (!). Putin stood nearby on the riverbank for a long time, staring into the distance. The landscape in that area is indeed marvelous; well worth looking at. I have been on that kurgan, at night in fact. And there were no snakes in sight.
Apparently the snakes at the kurgans of Staraya Ladoga are discriminating in their tastes . . .
The news reports cited “local residents who cautioned the President’s security service about snakes,” but these reports are unconvincing. It is more likely that the sorcerers in his entourage consider Putin to be the descendent of the Varangian princes, and as such he has inherited the ancient curse that was placed upon them for destroying Khazaria. And to this day the snakes of Staraya Ladoga preserve this legacy of revenge.
Many interesting facts are associated with Staraya Ladoga and with this ancient town’s role in the history of Rus. Professor A. N. Kirpichnikov, Director of the Staraya Ladoga Archeological Expedition of the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of the History of Material Culture, writes:
Our excavations revealed a multitude of beads, including an intact set of 2,500 beads, most likely intended for sale, and a mold for casting silver ingots, the second international currency of that time after the dirkhem. The ingots were cast in cylindrical form. Here too was discovered a ring with an Arabian design on the setting, and a gem of mountainous crystal. The inscription is from a sura in the Koran: “May Allah’s aid be with me, and on that aid alone do I place my hope and trust.” The ring had served as a seal (for marking shipments, goods, and documents) and, judging from the Arabic design, could have only belonged to a merchant from the East—evidence that traders from distant lands had visited Ladoga . . . From Scandinavia to the eastern lands travelers most likely would have made their way along the Great Volga route. The ring with the Arabic inscription and the other discoveries are significant indicators confirming Ladoga’s ties with distant countries, and evidencing its international economic significance in the tenth century.
In those days in Ladoga there were guilds of shipowners and sailors who came by way of the Volkhov River, from the Caspian Sea in the south, and from Scandinavia in the north. Ladoga itself also served as an assembly point for ship crews. These traders were attracted to the local market, especially to the furs from the northern forests that were on sale there, and which were considered the best in the world, and were paid for in silver.
. . . About the origins of the Rus people, opinions among scholars differ widely. The documentary sources situate the Rus people only on the territory of Eastern Europe; they are mentioned together with the Slavs. A chronicle entry notes that the Slavs and the Rus, the most important settlers in the area, spoke a common language. It seems to me that the difference between the Rus and the Slavs was not ethnic, but social. The Rus comprised an elite, an upper stratum of society. They engaged in trade, purchased concubines, and so forth. The social function of the Slavs was to serve this elite.
Many scholars hold to the opinion that the Rus were Scandinavians. This is not necessarily so. Most likely the Rus comprised international merchant communities and ships’ crews. Such groups may have included Scandinavians, as well as Finns and Slavs. Scandinavian sources do not identify the Rus as a people with a single distinct ethnicity.
The Rus are mentioned in the chronicles during the tenth and eleventh centuries, after which the concept expands and evolves: the Russian land, Rus, Russia. Who the initial Rus were remains an open question . . . But in the era of trade revolution the division of people into Rus and Slavs, in my opinion, is of broad sociological importance.
Even more interesting is the fact that Arabic, Byzantine, and European sources use the title “Hakan” (Khagan) to identify the rulers of Rus during the time when Staraya Ladoga was its capital. Ibn Rustah writes:
Ar-Rusiyi is located on an island in the middle of a lake. The island on which they live is a three-day’s journey in length, is covered with forests and swamps, and is so unhealthy and damp that the earth squishes underfoot with every step. They have a tsar, called the Hakan of the Rus. They come up by river, by ship, attack the Slavs and take them prisoner, transport them to Khazaran and Bulkar, and sell them there. They do not cultivate the land; they eat only what is brought in from the land of the Slavs . . . They do not claim ownership of land or villages. Their only occupation is trading sable, squirrel, and other furs, which they sell to buyers. They receive payment in coins that they keep in the folds of their belts . . . They treat their slaves well and clothe them well, for they are objects of trade. They have many towns, and they lead an unconstrained life. They treat guests with respect, including travelers who come from foreign lands and seek their protection . . . And if one of them raises a complaint against another, he is summoned to the tsar’s court, where they argue their cases. When the tsar pronounces his sentence, what he has commanded is carried out. And if both sides are dissatisfied with the tsar’s decision, then the issue is resolved by his command with weapons, and whichever one of them has the sharper sword is victorious . . . They have sorcerers, znakhary, some of whom issue orders to the tsar as though they were the rulers.
The same Arab author wrote that there were a hundred thousand people—Rus—on this island (Novgorod or Staraya Ladoga). And they all lived by preying upon the Slavic population. You might be curious to know how many Slavs there were at that time. It turns out that during the centuries after Rus, the northern lands went into decline. The desolation of the Russian lands might also have come as a result of the Khazar curse.
With the above erudite citations I hereby conclude my commentary on Pushkin’s poem.
Now let us move on to a survey of the purely historical works concerning Khazaria—though due to the dearth of reliable factual material they differ very little from the literary sources; the only difference is in their purported genre and in the ambitions of their authors, who claim to be providing reliable historical accounts. Nonetheless, an impressive number of books and articles have been written on the subject. A. A. Astaikin has compiled a bibliography of works on the history of Khazaria. I counted two hundred titles and then gave up.
According to A. P. Novoseltsev, the beginning of Khazar studies in Europe is may be traced to the well-known seventeenth-century scholar I. Burksdorf, who published a bilingual edition—the original along with a Latin translation—of the famous Khazar Correspondence. The first purely scholarly Russian (Soviet) work on the history of Khazaria was written by academician M. I. Artamonov. Abroad, the most famous work is D. M. Danlop’s The History of the Jewish Khazars.
Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov, the great Eurasian scholar and Turkophile, penned his own history of Khazaria. Along with his many other historical and theoretical achievements, he discovered Samandar, the ancient capital of Khazaria that predated even Itil. He published an account of his expedition to the area, which goes roughly as follows: The research expedition traveled in the area around the Terek, through Chechnya and Dagestan, but didn’t come across anything promising. At that point the expedition had seemed to run dry, along with its funding and the fuel for their vehicles. Then some hills come into sight, the first they had seen, and Lev Nikolaevich said: “Well look there! There it is! Samandar at last, for sure! Samandar. We will have to come back here.”
As far as I know, no one ever did go back; now the hills in those lands are completely different, and no one there has any interest in Samandar.
Actually, I love Gumilyov and respect him as an author; it’s just that it makes a lot more sense to read his books as fiction rather than history.
Whatever the case, eminent scholars have come up with a history of Khazaria that reads something like this:
Sixth to seventh centuries: the collapse of the Western-Turkish Khagan
ate, with Khazaria rising on its ruins, ruled by the Turkish Ashin dynasty.
Eighth to ninth centuries: war between the Khazar Khaganate and Iran; Judaism enters the region. Clashes with Varangians; alliances and divisions of spheres of influence.
Ninth to tenth centuries: Khazaria and Rus at war. The fall of Khazaria.
Eleventh to thirteenth centuries: the disappearance of Khazaria from the political map of Eurasia.
The capitals of the Khazar realm were, in order, Belendzher, Samandar, and Itil. A pattern comparable to that of the Russian capitals: Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. Other important cities include Savgar and Serkel (Belaya Vezha); the last of these was built by Byzantine engineers.
Among the political customs of Khazaria, the more interesting included: power sharing between the Khagan and the Bek; a distinctive inauguration procedure during which the Khagan was throttled with a silken thread; and the Khagan’s harem, made up of princesses taken from conquered lands and allied tribes.
During the early years, when Samandar was presumed to be its capital, the economy of Khazaria was based on agriculture, primarily viticulture, and fishing. Later, when the capital moved to Itil, transit trade began to flourish. Merchants who came from other lands noted with some surprise that the Khazars were able to thrive on trade, though they produced nothing at all in their country except for a suspicious-looking substance they called “fish paste.”
As for the appearance of the Khazar people, travelers reported that there were “white” and “black” Khazars. The “whites” were tall, blond, and blue-eyed, resembled Swedes, and represented the elite of their society. They were served by the “blacks,” who had dark hair and skin and were short of stature and were of generally unprepossessing appearance. Soviet historians expressed some doubt about this division and conjectured that the differences between the elite and the common people had nothing to do with race: Perhaps, they theorized, the Khazar proletariat just didn’t have many opportunities to bathe.
It is also known that when the Khazars besieged the Armenian capital, the latter initiated the world’s very first Halloween celebration, setting out in view of the Khazar warriors a huge pumpkin with carved-out eyes and a straw beard stuck on the bottom. They told the Khazars: “This is your Khagan!” For some reason the Khazars took offense, and the episode led to a bloodbath.
The Khazar Khaganate had an active foreign policy. They established alliances and declared wars, spread their influence and participated in the lives of both European and Asian states, leaving traces in many foreign chronicles. For example, the Byzantine emperor Mikhail III once called Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, a “Khazar-face.” But for all that, Khazaria didn’t leave a single written source for its future historians.
Excavation of one Khazar settlement, it’s true, unearthed a stone with written inscriptions that are presumed to be Khazar. But despite all their combined efforts, historians and linguists have been unable to decipher them.
Scholars do have access to one source that is conventionally presumed to be Khazar. This is the correspondence between a Spanish Jew known as Hasdai ibn Shaprut and the Khagan Joseph. The authenticity of the correspondence has long been challenged, skeptics arguing that if there had been no letters, then the medieval Jews would have had to invent them. The same thing can be said about the very existence of the Khazar Khaganate.
The most energetic scholars of Khazar history tend to concern themselves with questions related to Judaism, being either Zionists or anti-Zionists. It’s clear why. For a people scattered across the face of the earth, the existence of an empire in which their beliefs served as the official state religion (?) was (is) of great significance. After ancient Israel and before modern-day Israel there have been only two such experiments with the Jewish nation as a state, both of them on the territory of what is now Russia: the Khazar Khaganate in the Volga delta and the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, with its capital in the city of Birobidzhan.
Special mention should be made of the book by noted Hungarian and Jewish writer Arthur Koestler entitled The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage. The author had an eventful life. Here, in brief, are the highlights of his biography:
Koestler was born on September 5, 1905 in Budapest. From 1926 to 1929 he served as a Near East correspondent for a German publishing concern; he spent 1929–30 working in Paris. In 1931 he flew to the North Pole on the dirigible Graf Zeppelin. Subsequently he traveled around Central Asia, and spent a year living in the Soviet Union. At the end of his life he argued on behalf of the Exit movement, which defends the right of people to take their own lives; he put this idea into practice in London on March 1, 1983 by taking a lethal dose of a soporific (?) drug.
Arthur Koestler prefaces The Thirteenth Tribe with a quote from the Arab writer Al-Muqadassi: “In Khazaria, sheep, honey, and Jews exist in large quantities.”
The Russian translator of Koestler’s book includes the entire quotation, not without a certain ridicule: “Al-Khazar is a vast region beyond the Caspian Sea. Impassable mud, great quantities of sheep, honey, and Jews.”
One is forced to admit that, with some exceptions, very little has changed since those days. Modern akyn bard Boris Grebenshikov has a song about the modern country that occupies the territory of what used to be the Khazan Khaganate:
They make a show of pride;
They seem so debonair;
But when you look inside:
Dirt, mud, and disrepair.
The main thesis of Koestler’s book, which he argues very effectively, is that the so-called Western Jews are not even Semitic in origin; they came not from the Near East, but from Khazaria.
Studies on the history of Khazaria provide us with an entire palette of different and often contradictory conclusions. The major axes of the “Khazar polemics” in their present form are as follows:
First axis: Khazaria and Judaism. First: Were they Jewish or not? The majority of scholars agree that they were. In other words, Khazaria adopted Judaism as a state religion. Views differ, though, as to the dates, circumstances and implications of this religious reform. Authors inclining toward Zionism identify the earliest plausible date, arguing that Khazaria adopted Judaism just before it reached its peak as a state, and attributing its success directly to the conversion. Authors inclined toward anti-Semitism argue for a later date, one that immediately precedes the fall of the Khazar Empire. Naturally they consider Judaism the cause for the empire’s decline and fall.
Academic historians who are relatively unbiased concerning this question incline toward the view that only the elite converted to Judaism and that this change did not have a major influence on the lives of the masses or on the fate of the state.
Second axis: origins. Distinguished scholar A. A. Tiunyaev offers the least disputable version of the origin of the Khazars: “The Khazars, a nomadic people belonging to a so-called Turkish tribe that initially dwelled between the Caspian and Black Seas, appeared in Eastern Europe in the fourth century after the invasion of the Huns.” However, even as scholars repeat this phrase, “appeared . . . after,” they maintain an enigmatic silence as to its meaning. Either the Huns who settled in these parts began to be called Khazars, or some other kind of invasion took place. All scholarship on the subject retains this ambiguity: Whenever mentioning the origin of the Khazars, they resort to the phrase: “appeared . . . after.”
Third axis: the dispute as to heritage. If the existing scholarship is uniformly unsatisfying regarding the origin of the Khazars, there is a clear surplus of theories about the heirs to that culture’s historical glory. The abovementioned Koestler considers all European Jews, the Ashkenazi, to be descendants of the Khazars. Lev Gumilyov, after carefully studying data on the skull shapes and average height of the Terek Kazaks, identified them as heirs to the Khazar ethnicity. God Himself decreed that the Crimean Karaites would succeed the Khazars. But the Altai peoples also claim this legacy, citing common language features. The R
ussians, too, are in the fray: Some scholars modestly remind their readers that Slavs made up the majority of the Khaganate’s population and hence held the rightful claim to Khazaria. Others simply assert that the Khazars were in fact Russians, and that there were no Turks in sight. For my part, I’ve found quite a bit of evidence that the Khazars were Chechens.
To sum up: According to data gathered and verified by historians, the Khazar Khaganate was a state either of Turks, or Jews, or Slavs, or Caucasians, or, in general, of Swedes. The Khazars appeared from somewhere. Or they always were present, but under a different name. During the Khazar Khaganate or in the sixth, or the eighth, or eleventh century they adopted Judaism. Judaism was adopted either by a small group in the highest social elite, or by the masses; it either influenced the fate and culture of the Khaganate or did not; it either enabled its rise or hastened its collapse, or was never adopted at all. After the disappearance of the Khazar Khaganate, the heirs to its culture and traditions were either Crimean Karaites, or European Jews, or Altais, or there were no heirs whatsoever.
Thus, my research has lead me to three precise and definitive conclusions:
• The Khazar Khaganate existed in the past in some territory or other; or,
• The Khazar Khaganate existed and continues to exist, but in a different dimension, some kind of parallel reality; or,
• The Khazar Khaganate never existed anywhere. It is a model or plan, devised at some point in history, that is destined to, or simply might happen to, come into being sometime in the future.
INAUGURATION
And the time came for the great celebration of the entire Khazar people. In the bazaars entertainers played flutes and told funny stories. Sorcerers kindled fires, sending clouds of heady smoke into the sky. Colorful rags fluttered in the breeze over the rooftops, frightening the feathered creatures of the air. Crippled veterans of righteous wars were served leftover dead groundhogs for the glory of the Khagan and the Bek—let them, too, rejoice! And the Khagan’s palace filled with people; the entire Khazar elite—the beau monde—gathered there. Faces white, silks rustling, emeralds and rubies sparkling; if all the lamps in the palace had been extinguished, it would still be full of light from all the precious stones. Brilliant of mind and pure of soul! What are you next to them? The elite has gathered, the elite will feed its face. What a feast! Tables laden with victuals, fine drinks glittering in silver carafes, you could drown in them. The palace buzzed like a nest of wasps, everyone eating and drinking, drinking and eating. Now into the center of the hall strode the Great Bek. His jewel-encrusted platinum staff thundered against the floor and the sound reverberated through the great hall!
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