About the book: 2020 / Where did the Russian land come from? The mystery of the name Rus and the two-hundred-year-old “dispute about the Varangians.” Discovery of Slavic writing. All these are things of bygone days. Moreover, the past is so long ago that it is no longer possible to find out reliably - not only who Rurik was, but whether he existed at all. In this book, we tried to place the beginning of Russian history in two contexts. The first is the historical context itself, or rather, broadly historical . Russia does not exist in a vacuum - there are many states around its borders. There was no emptiness in ancient times either: Rus' was connected by thousands of threads with its neighbors - in the space of geography and ancestors - in the space of chronological. The second context is historiography. We invite you on an exciting journey that is more interesting than even the most twisted thriller. After all, history is the best screenwriter. Not a single person is able to create a narrative equal in intensity to the novel that millions of people and dozens of nations wrote with their lives and deaths over thousands of years.