I have been looking and I just can’t find any sources? I have sites telling me that remains indicate Russia has been inhabited since the Paleolithic period, and then picking up at around 300 AD with the arrival of the Goths, Mongols, and Turks. What happened there in the meantime, while Julius Caesar ruled Rome? Can anyone tell me or refer me to web sites?
As I recall (no cite), it was colonized by kin of the Vikings, who really, really got around.
As for who was there prior to them…I dunno.
A lot of different tribes. Some of the more famous would have been the Scythians, who lived along the Black Sea, the Sarmartians, the Alans, the Huns, the Goths (as you mentioned), the Turks, etc.
Lots of various tribes. Rurik doesn’t show up until the 9th Century.
Nah, the Vikings don’t show up in Russia until the 9th century. Part of the problem answering your question is that the people who lived on the Russian steppe at that time…they weren’t literate cultures. So all we know about them is their interactions with literate cultures. So, some Chinese source will say “We fought a bunch of barbarians who call themselves the Huns”, or “There are people to the northwest called the Turks”, or some Greek author will say, “To the north of the colonies on the Black Sea, there are a people called the Scythians, who make cups out of the skulls of their enemies” or whatever.
So, of the inhabitants of the Russian steppes in ancient history, we know the time period starting around 300-400 AD best because that’s when, for whatever reason, there’s conflict on the steppe. The Huns, for whatever reason, get in a period of aggression, and start attacking their neighbors and moving around. So this triggers a chain reaction, and all the other tribes on the Russian steppe start trying to get away from them, and escaping into the Roman empire. Did the Goths just suddenly appear out of nowhere as a people, when Roman chroniclers report the Visigoths attacking in 263? Of course not, but before that, they were just minding their own business on the steppe, and the Romans didn’t care enough about them to write about them.
So, since we only know about these ancient people from their neighbors who wrote stuff down, there’s a lot of history we can’t know for sure, during the whole time periods in which they didn’t bother their aforementioned literate neighbors.
IIRC the Romans called the area Sarmatia
Are those the Sarmatians who colonized Mars? 
Scythians, Alans, Goths, Turks… Only the invaders are cited because they made history, but it is evident that Russian, Lithuanian and Latvian languages did exist at that time. There is historical evidence that Slavic peoples reached Ancient Greece. Lithuanian is one of the most ancient Indo-European languages, and extended over a much larger territory than today’s.
Lithuanina is, in many ways, one of the most conservative I-E languages, but you really can’t say one language is older than another. We’ve had this discussion in this forum many times before.
Presumably, the ancestral Russians and Ukrainians, the Baltic peoples, and the old Finnic tribes (Livs, Veps, and so on) occupied much of the European steppe prior to the mass migrations of the early Christian Era, and have just never migrated.
Most of that migration, by the way, seems to have resulted from the unification and defense of China under the Ch’in and Han dynasties, causing the tribes to the north that had been raiding to instead move west, exerting pressure on the nomads west of them, who in turn menaced those west of them, etc., in a continent-wide game of toppling dominoes.
Note: I find it one of those fascinating, tantalizing details of prehistory that the peoples whom the Scythians ousted according to Strabo et al. were the Cimmerians (not Conan’s tribe but a historical group; Howard lifted the name for his fantasies) – and that the Cymry according to the oldest Celtic legends migrated from “the shores of the Black Sea” to Britain via the Iberian Peninsula.
Finns.
Thank you for the answers. I’ve been really curious about it for a while. Last year, while I was participating in my school’s Social Studies academic team, we studied Russia and the book that I read for it vaguely mentioned some nomadic tribes living in the area before the arrival of the Tatars but never said anything concrete. I tried to find out on my own but i just could not find any resources. So every once in a while I’d start looking, get stymied and stop. I figured the dope would be a good place to ask.
I’m from Russia and when I was back 2 years ago I was amazed at how pretty it looked from the air. I wanted to go back in time just for a day or two to live in a small village before Russia had roads and cars and industrial pollution and a nuclear arsenal the Khans would give their testicles for. Now its easier to imagine it.
To extend the Cimmerian story, the Cimmerians ended up in the Crimea after they got pushed out by the Scythians. To what degree they were Hellenized I’m not certain, but I believe Mithradates Eupator subjugated them during his expansion and prior to his conflicts with the late Roman Republic. What happened to them after that is beyond my knowledge of the topic, though I imagine they ended up mixed with everyone else who ever showed up on the peninsula, which was…well, pretty much everyone. It’s quite likely that they were kicking around as a discrete ethnic group early in the centuries AD though.
Conan vs. the Roman Legion would’ve made a good movie.
At present there are Finnic speaking people in northeast Russia, in Karelia on the border with Finland, to the north of St. Petersburg, and to the south of there, bordering Estonia. Where St. Petersburg is now was originally inhabited by the Finnic Ingrian people before the Russians decided to build a Baltic port there. In extreme northwestern Russia, the Kola Peninsula, live the Saami. There are also Finnic nations all over eastern European Russia: The Komi Republic along the northern Urals, south of the Komi are Udmurts, southwest of the Udmurt in the Russian heartland east of Moscow are the Mari, whose republic borders on Tatarstan, and then come the southernmost Finns, the Mordvin. So European Russia is edged on both the east and west with Finnic peoples.
What I’m saying is, before Slavs took over the middle of Russia, the whole area was Finnic all the way across, and this is the answer to the OP: Finns throughout central, eastern, western, and northern Russia. Southern Russia, however, was Scythian. The map also clearly shows why the language family that Finnic belongs to was named Uralic. Its earliest speakers apparently really did live along the Urals, about 6.0 x 10[sup]3[/sup] YBP. It seems pretty certain to me that in Julius Caesar’s time Moscow was inhabited by Finns.
However, note that the name of Finnic-speaking Estonia got its name from an ancient Indo-European Baltic people, the Aestii, who probably spoke an ancestral form of Latvian. I would say that the IE Baltic people were already settled in that region before Finns had moved that far west.
There are Indo-Iranian loanwords into Proto-Finno-Ugric, dating from at least 4000 BP, pointing to a time when Iranian speakers (ancestors of the Scythians) roamed the steppes of Russia and came in contact with PFU speakers in perhaps Mordvinia. There are even loanwords so old, 6000 BP, they came from Proto-Indo-European into Proto-Uralic, (e.g. Finnish nimi ‘name’) which supports the theory that IE came from the steppes of southern Russia.
Map of Finnic speaking peoples in 400 AD:
http://uralica.com/400ad.htm
Johanna, absolutely no disagreement about the Finnic peoples. I’m curious as to what evidence we have regarding the East Slavs and how we can judge who replaced whom where. Certainly the Russians have expanded in historic times into formerly-Finnic areas, and I’m aware of the ancientry of continental-Finnic culture, but do we know by anything (besides linguistic conservatism) that they preceded the Slavs in the present Rodina?
Danja, before the arrival of the Tatars, present-day Tatarstan was inhabited by a different Turkic people, the Bulgars, who were there as early as the 5th century. I think they must have moved to the Volga from across the steppes as part of the movements of peoples associated with the Hun invasions. The Volga region, as noted above, was Finno-Ugric speaking before the Bulgars moved in. The Chuvash language spoken next to Tatarstan is descended from the ancient Bulgar language (though some Altaicists think it’s more closely related to Mongolian than Turkish).
Poly, look at this map http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic or Uralic distribution that although it’s way oversimplified, gives a good view of the broad outlines. East Russia: Finnic. West Russia: Finnic. Central Russia: it got hollowed out somehow. What would Sherlock Holmes say? History shows again and again how agriculturalists (in this case Slavs) take fertile land from hunter-gatherers (Finno-Ugrians). Ecologically, the two cultures could not have coexisted. Old Finno-Ugric culture lived off the forests, gathering honey and fishing in the many streams. Slavic agriculturalists had the ax long before they had the icon. They were all about clearing the forests.
This map http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Finno_Ugric_Languages.png with better granularity shows Finnic populations in central Russia not very far from Moscow in modern times. Displacement of Finns by Russians was observable in recent historical time, with the building of St. Petersburg.
To answer your question: The evidence is archaeological.