About the book: 2012 / Literary and artistic publication From whom historians over the past three centuries have not deduced the Russians: from the Slavs and Scandinavians , from the Ugrians and Khazars, from the Goths and Finns, and even from Georgians and Jews. And indeed, in the 10th–11th centuries, many people who considered themselves “of Russian descent” had names and nicknames that were Slavic, Iranian, Scandinavian, and Turkic... So who were these mysterious Russians by nationality? The author of this book offers an unexpected and paradoxical hypothesis: is it possible, in principle, to approach the description of Rus' as an ethnic phenomenon? It is possible that the term “Rus” initially did not have an ethnic meaning, but only a socio-professional one, denoting people belonging to the military and trade layers and forming the sum of military-trading corporations operating along the entire length of the Volga and Dnieper trade routes, as well as in the adjacent territories.