I struggled with producing an opening statement that would describe the genre of Aleksei Tolochko's book, and eventually decided to admit defeat. The author accurately describes his work as not being an academic monograph (10). Indeed, it is not. But what is it? Tolochko's stated goal is to debunk the misconceptions present in what he sees as the mainstream historiography of Rus΄, which include using the Primary Chronicle as a reliable source for ninth-century history and accepting uncritically A. A. Shakhmatov's reconstructions of hypothetical, extinct texts (9, 20–34).

Indeed, some Russian and Ukrainian historians still rely heavily on nineteenth-century scholarship. Outdated historical concepts are not as mainstream as Tolochko presents them, but, along with outright pseudo-history, they often shape popular perceptions of early Rus΄. In Tolochoko's country, Ukraine, even the mainstream media reported the “discoveries” of “Ukrainian genes” in Neolithic settlements where “proto-Ukrainian” was spoken five thousand years ago. Tolochko does not mention popular nationalistic myths, but one may hazard a guess that he had them in mind while writing his book, which is animated by the sentiment that there was nothing “glorious” about the origins of Rus΄.

In addition to a welcome debunking of nationalistic and outdated views, the book offers a new interpretation of the emergence of Rus΄, limiting the role of the indigenous population in this process to providing slaves for the Scandinavians. Tolochko makes a leap from citing the well-known fact that Scandinavians traded in slaves to the claim that this was their exclusive occupation in eastern Europe. The amount of other goods was negligible, because the region did not have anything else to offer.

Tolochko does not consider wax and honey, and he dismisses the commonly-held view about the significance of the fur trade for the early history of the east European plain by citing fifteenth-century data. Contrary to overwhelming evidence that fur-bearing animals shared the fate of other natural resources exploited by humans—that is, as time went, their numbers declined or they disappeared altogether—Tolochko assumes that the amount of the fur trade in the tenth century “must have been” lower than in the fifteenth (178).

This argument reflects Tolochko's belief that everything, from the number of wild animals to the economic standing of any given region, can only progress with time. The territory of the Derevlian land was poor in the modern period; therefore, it could not offer anything of value in the ninth century (227). Archeological evidence for the Derevlians' involvement in long-distance commerce is thus a “puzzle” which Tolochko solves by postulating a large-scale slave trade. Another argument is the size of burial grounds along riverways. Without citing any archeologist who would view the size of the burial grounds as a problem in need of a solution, Tolochko states that “the only explanation” is a large number of slaves dying on their way to the markets. To “prove” that slave-traders would give their victims individual burials, many of which were labor-consuming big mounds, Tolochko refers to excavations of the eighteenth-century African burial ground in New York (228–29).

Tolochko's treatment of written sources is equally cavalier. He ascribes to Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard the outlandish idea that excavations at Staraia Ladoga indicate the existence of a “powerful state” there, and then criticizes them for this and other nezamyslovatye (simplistic) views that they never expressed (123, 142); he interprets a passage from the Bertin Annals by speculating on what answer Portuguese slave-traders in Africa would have given if asked about their king (236); and he uses a Russian translation of Constantine Porphyrogenitus to argue that the much-debated passage about Rhosia is “crystal clear” and the difficulties of its interpretation are invented by prejudiced scholars (205). Some names are given in footnotes, but there is no reference to the most recent discussion of the Greek text, which contradicts Tolochko's reading (P. S. Stefanovich, Boiare, otroki, druzhiny: Voenno-politicheskaia elita Rusi v X-XI vv. [2012]). Of course, accidental omissions happen, but Tolochko comes dangerously close to “post-truth” when he defends the historian's right to ignore relevant literature and to formulate new theories in a “non-monograph” format that he appears to believe renders him free from the obligation to be scholarly rigorous (10–11). If his book contributes to a destruction of nationalistic myths, it will serve a good purpose; however, it may be replacing old myths with new ones.