У истоков восточнославянских государств: Вождества или их альтернативы?
At the origins of the East Slavic states: Chiefdoms or their alternatives?

Summary/Abstract: Historians do not take advantage of the opportunity they have to conduct a comparative analysis of the two Eastern European states: The Great Duke of Lithuania and Moskow state, which became the «real» states till the 16th century. Although we are inspired to do this work by the research of the political anthropologists. A multilinear approach to history allows us to compare Lithuania and Kievan Rus. Such comparison shows us that one of the most important stages of polygenesis is a chiefdom, the analysis of which, based on Lithuanian material, is the subject of the article. Chiefdom is somehow correlated with tribal structures and military democracy, but it is precisely this that is the transitional step to the state. The chiefdom formed during the ruling of Mindaugas and continued to exist and to develop, retaining the same qualities and acquiring new ones. It is very important to understand the contacts between Lithuanian chiefdom and Old Russian city-states, some of which are being formed right before our eyes on the edges of the ancient Russian ecumene. Something common arises, held together by both military and organizational principles. The Lithuanian princes appeared as the rulers in Old Russian cities and Russian lands found themselves in tributary dependence. From these relations an archaic military-service («typical») state was born, which could move towards the estate monarchy. City-states can apparently be an alternative to chiefdom, but in our regions they followed the ancient Russian chiefdoms or entered into a kind of symbiosis with the Lithuanian one.

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