Ruthenia

:Name of Russia redirects here. See Name of Russia (Russia TV) for the television programme.

Originally, the name Rus (????, Rus') referred to the people, the region and the medieval states (9th to 12th centuries): Rus' Khaganate and Kievan Rus' polities. The territories of the latter are today distributed among Belarus, Ukraine and a part of the European section of the Russian Federation. The name of Russia that came into use in the 17th century is derived from Rus.

To distinguish the medieval "Rus" state from other states that derived from it, modern historiography calls it "Kievan Rus'." Its predecessor, the 9th-century "Rus' Khaganate" is a somewhat hypothetical state whose existence is inferred from a handful of early medieval Byzantine and Persian/Arabic sources that mention that the Rus people were governed by a khagan.

"Rus" as a state had no proper name; by its inhabitants it was called "Ruskaya zemlya" (with Ruskaya alternatively spelled Rouskaya, Ruskaya, Rus'kaya, and Russkaya), which might be translated as "Rus land" or "Land of the Rus". In similar fashion, Poland is still called Polska by its inhabitants, and the Czech lands (?eské zem?) are sometimes called by the name ?esko.

Category: Image - :Slavic europe.svg|thumb|Countries with majority Slavic ethnicities and at least one Slavic national language

The Slavic Peoples are an ethnic and linguistic branch of Indo-European peoples, living mainly in eastern and central Europe. From the early 6th century they spread from their original homeland (most commonly thought to be in Eastern Europe) to inhabit most of eastern Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Balkans.Geography and ethnic geography of the Balkans to 1500 Many settled later in SiberiaFiona Hill, Russia ? Coming In From the Cold?, The Globalist, 23 February 2004 and Central AsiaRobert Greenall, Russians left behind in Central Asia, BBC News, 23 November 2005. or emigrated to other parts of the world.Terry Kirby, 750,000 and rising: how Polish workers have built a home in Britain, The Independent, 11 February 2006.Poles in the United States, Catholic Encyclopedia Over half of Europe is, territorially speaking, inhabited by Slavic-speaking communitiesThe Early Slavs. Culture and Society in Ealry Medieval Europe. P M barford. Cornell University Press. 2001. ISBN 0-9014-3977-9. Pg 1: In total, well over half of Europe is, in terms of territorial extent (if not demographically), inhabited by communities speaking one of the many Slav languages and dialects.

Modern nations and ethnic groups called by the ethnonym "Slavs" are considerably genetically and culturally diverse and relations between them are varied, ranging from a sense of connection to feelings of mutual resentment. "Kundera emphasized that for a thousand years the Czechs never had any direct contact with Russia. In spite of their linguistic kinship, the Czechs and the Russians never shared a common world, neither a common history of common culture.(...) Joseph Conrad wrote that "nothing could be more alien to what is called in literary world "the Slavic spirit" than the Polish temperament with its chivalric devotion to moral constraints and its exaggerated respect for individual rights" History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change. Robert Bideleux. Routledge 1998.(accentuation added. . From its beginning, Poland drew its primary inspiration from Western Europe and developed a closer affinity with the French and Italians, for example, than with nearer Slavic neighbours of Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine heritage. This westward orientation, which in some ways has made Poland the easternmost outpost of Latinate and Catholic tradition, helps to explain the Poles' tenacious sense of belonging to the "West" and their deeply rooted antagonism toward Russia as the representative of an essentially alien way of life.U.S. Library of Congress[http://countrystudies.us/poland/5.htm]accentuation added).

Slavic peoples are classified geographically into West Slavic (including Czechs, Kashubians, Moravians, Poles, Silesians, Slovaks and Sorbs), East Slavic (including Belarusians, Russians, Rusyns and Ukrainians), and South Slavic (including Bosniaks, Bulgarians, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes). For a more comprehensive list, see Ethno-cultural subdivisions.

According to a 2007 genetic study[http://www.springerlink.com/content/c3ht013txp686v71/ Rebala K et al. (2007), Y-STR variation among Slavs: evidence for the Slavic homeland in the middle Dnieper basin'', Journal of Human Genetics, 52:406-14] based on Y-chromosome male haplogroups, Slavic men cluster into two main groups; one encompasses all Western-Slavic, Eastern-Slavic, and two Southern-Slavic male populations (western Croats, Slovenes), whilst the other group encompasses all remaining Southern Slavic men.