Where and when did Ancient Russia come from?
There are still no exact and unambiguous answers to these questions, because the ethnic map of our country began to fold in such a distant epoch of primitive communal system, when there was no writing yet, and archaeological monuments (ancient objects, structures, images, burials, etc.) do not give information about the language - the most important ethnic attribute.
Our distant ancestors were Slavs - the largest group of nations in Europe, connected by kinship, a community of residence and proximity to the language. This group includes eastern Slavs - Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians; western Slavs - Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Kashubs and Luscians; southern Slavs - Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins and Bosnians.
All Slavs belong to a large family of Indo-European peoples who have long inhabited Europe and part of Asia (up to and including India). The Indo-European family of languages includes several groups of related languages: Slavic, Baltic, German, Romanesque, Iranian, Indian, etc. Among the Indo-European peoples, the peoples of the Baltic group are the closest to the Slavs: Lithuanians, Latvians, and ancient Prussians.
The problem of the origin and settlement of the Slavs is still debatable, but numerous studies by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, and linguists provide an opportunity to draw a general picture of the early history of the Slavic peoples.
The area of settlement of Slavic tribes was Central and Eastern Europe. According to Soviet, Polish and Czechoslovak archaeologists, the Proto-Slavic tribes were the most ancient tribes - the carriers of the archaeological culture of the so-called cord ceramics. They were engaged in agriculture and cattle breeding and in the middle of 3-2 millennia BC settled on vast areas between the Dnieper River in the east, the Karaats in the south, Odra in the west and the Baltic Sea in the north.
In the second half of the 1st millennium B.C. and in the first half of the 1st millennium A.D. the forest-steppe zone of this area was inhabited by tribes known from the culture of burial fields. As a rule, they burned the dead and buried the ashes in the ground in special clay vessels - urns in cemeteries. They lived in a primitive communal system; in the first half of the 1st millennium A.D. they already knew plough farming and pottery circle (Chernyakhovskaya culture), which testifies, on the one hand, to the beginning of separation of the craft from agriculture and, on the other hand, to the beginning of decomposition of the tribal system. Archaeologists consider them early Slavic tribes.
Among this early Slavic population there were no strong economic and cultural ties and there was a process of ethnic differentiation.
By the end of the Bronze Age and in the early Iron Age, culturally peculiar groups of tribes emerged, including in the east of the Podneprovsk culture tribes, and in the west - tribes of Lusatian culture. It was the beginning of the formation of east and West Slavs.
Western Slavs who lived in the 3-2 centuries BC. -4-5 centuries A.D. in the basin of the Vistula and Odra and in the upper reaches of the Dniester (on the territory of present-day Poland and its neighboring regions of Ukraine) are clearly represented by the Pshevor culture. It was named after the Imperial Eagle in Przeworsk and was formed on the basis of variants of the Lusatian culture.
In the first centuries A.D. Western Slavic tribes that inhabited the territory from the northern spurs of the Carpathians (the Venetian Mountains) to the Baltic Sea, for the first time mention the ancient authors. Under the name of the Venedes they were known to Pliny the Elder, Tatiana, and Ptolemy Claudius. From the 1st-2nd centuries until the late Middle Ages, the name "Veneda" extended to a significant part of the Western Slavs.
In the middle of 1 millennium A.D. at Slavs process of disintegration of primitive communal system finished. It was promoted by a wide distribution of iron, development of agriculture and cattle breeding, the origin of a craft. According to many sources, by this time Venedas were divided into two groups of folds and antes. The settlement area of the Union of Warehouses was the land to the west of the Dniester, and the tribal union of Antes was the Dniester and Middle Dnieper regions.
At the turn of the 5th-6th centuries, the antes together with the warehouses entered the struggle against the Byzantine Empire. This struggle was a part of the general battle of European tribes with slave-holding states of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, which was one of the signs of the crisis of the slave-holding system. The struggle of Slavs with Byzantium proceeded within 100 years and has come to the end that at the beginning of 7 century Slavs have lodged a river Danube and a part of the Balkan peninsula. It has been put by it the beginning of the third Slavic group - to southern Slavs.
In the middle of 1 millennium A.D. on the extensive territory of Eastern Europe, from lake Ilmen to the Black Sea steppes and from East Carpathians to the Volga, the East Slavic tribes have developed. Historians have about 15 such tribes.