BY TOP WAR
After reading the title of this article, the reader will first of all remember Pushkin’s “Song of the Prophetic Oleg”:
How is prophetic Oleg now gathered
Take revenge on the unreasonable Khazars.
Their villages and fields for a violent raid
He doomed swords and fires …
So, in The Tale of Bygone Years, the chronicler begins the Russian history with the mention of the tribute that the Khazars collected from the Slavic tribes of the Middle Dnieper. Nestor the chronicler tells how the steppe-Khazars approached the land of the meadows – the then inhabitants of Kyiv, and demanded tribute from them, and the meadows gave them tribute with swords, in which the Khazars saw an unkind sign! Later, this happened, the chronicler concludes his story – the Russian princes began to own the Khazars.
As Alexander Sergeevich wrote, the Khazars were “avenged”, but not by Oleg and not by his son Igor, but by Igor’s heir, Svyatoslav, who in the 960s defeated the once powerful Khazar state, leaving no stone unturned from him …
