ABSTRACT
The connection between Russia and the Caucasus goes back to the year a .d . 914, when a Varangian expedition from the mouth of the Dnieper reached the Caspian by way of the Don and the Volga, the ships or boats being dragged over land from the first to the second of those rivers. In 944, three years after Igor, Prince of Kieffs attack on Constanti nople, others of these “ Russ ” or “ Ros ” (Varangians, Variags) again made their appearance on the Caspian, in vaded Persia, and captured from the Arabs the city of Berdaa, capital of Arran, now Karabâgh.1 A little later the Grand
Prince Sviàtoslav extended his conquests to the river Koubân in the north-west Caucasus, and carried on war against the Yassi and the Kossogs, supposed to have been the ancestors of the modern Ossietines and Tcherkess (Circassians) and before the end of the same century these Variags, Russ or Russians, had established the Principality of Tmoutarakân, the Tamatarchia of the Greeks, on the peninsula opposite Kertch, now called Tamân, all notices of which cease, however, in the Russian chronicles from the year 1094.
