For three hundred years we have been told that the Russian State exists only thanks to the Normans. That our Slavic ancestors were an ‘unhistorical’ people, fit only to fertilize the soil for Western civilization. That the Slavs appeared in the Pripyat swamps, and were driven there again by any passing nomadic people. That we learned to read from the Greeks, to trade from the Germans, and to swim from the Swedes. And the Slavs have only vodka and laziness of their own. But then it is unclear how our people managed to create a thousand-year empire the size of one sixth of the land? And really, how? Who are the Russians really? And where did we come from? Who was Prince Rurik - a Slav or a Swede? The remarkable historian of the Russian Diaspora Sergei Lesnoy answers these questions.