The sculptural portrait of Kyivan Prince Yaroslav the Wise (1939) by Soviet anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov is a recreation of the appearance of the prominent representative of the Rurik dynasty using a method he developed.
In the 1930s, the Kyivan Prince Yaroslav the Wise sarcophagus was repeatedly the subject of scientific research attended by historians, doctors, museologists, anthropologists, and other scientists. For example, on 25 January 1936, a commission headed by the director of the Museum Town, M. Bahrii, examined the contents of the sarcophagus for the first time. At the bottom of the sarcophagus, they found a disorderly accumulation of bones belonging to a man and a woman, as well as small fragments of a child’s skull. The sarcophagus was opened for the second time in 1939. At that time, the commission, which included the famous Soviet scientist V. Ginzburg, decided to transfer the recovered bone remains for further study to the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences. At the initial research stage, it was established that these bone remains belonged to an elderly man of approximately 60–70 and a woman of approximately 50–60. Subsequently, multiple deformities and significant pathological changes in the bones of the man’s right lower limb were found in the man’s skeleton.
A comparison of written sources (ancient chronicles) and the results of anatomical and radiological studies showed that they are broadly consistent. This circumstance made it possible to conclude that Prince Yaroslav the Wise was indeed buried in St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv and to recreate his appearance. It was based on these recovered bones (skull) that Mikhail Gerasimov created a sculptural portrait of Kyivan Prince Yaroslav the Wise
Soviet researchers who specialized in studying Kyivan Rus actively used this sculptural portrait of Kyivan Prince Yaroslav the Wise in their work. For example, it appears as a plausible reconstruction of the appearance of a prominent representative of the Rurik dynasty in the monographs of Borys Rybakov, Petro Tolochko, and other Soviet historians. At the same time, the period spanning the ninth to twelfth centuries was a rather popular topic in Soviet historiography. Historians of that time mostly used the concept of the Old Russian nation. According to this hypothesis, in the ninth to twelfth centuries, in the process of ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs, the ‘Old Russian nation’ was formed, which was the common ancestor of three late medieval Eastern Slavic peoples – Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. This concept originated in the historiography of the Russian Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. Later, it was picked up and actively used by Soviet researchers. In particular, since the late 1930s, Soviet historical scholarship has advocated the idea of Kyivan Rus as the “common cradle” of the history of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. In 1939, the historian Boris Grekov put forward the idea of the ethnic unity of the “Russian people” in the period of Kyivan Rus.
This concept allowed Soviet historians not only to date the beginning of state-building processes in these territories from the ninth to the twelfth centuries but also to show its historical continuity (through the Moscow Kingdom and the Russian Empire, this state-building process continued uninterrupted until the Soviet Union – the fact that the territories of the Ukrainian and Belarusian SSR were for some time part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was often overlooked or ignored by Soviet historians), but also to create a narrative about the original belonging of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians to a single political, economic and cultural space. This was especially important in the early 1940s, during the first years of the German-Soviet war, when the Soviet government tried to unite the different peoples of the USSR in the face of a common enemy, Nazi Germany. Monuments to representatives of the Rurik dynasty, such as the sculptural portrait of Kyivan Prince Yaroslav the Wise by Mikhail Gerasimov, served as a kind of material evidence for Soviet historians of these narratives about the commonality of the peoples of the USSR.
Moreover, Mikhail Gerasimov depicted the Kyivan prince Yaroslav the Wise as somewhat similar to the first Moscow tsar, Ivan IV, and Mongolian khans. This helped create a sense of a common homeland among the different peoples of the USSR. At the same time, modern reconstructions of the appearance of Kyivan Prince Yaroslav the Wise, conducted using other methods, somewhat refute the claim that his appearance is similar to that of Mongol khans.
![Tolochko, Piotr. Drevniaia Rus’. Ocherki sotsialno-politicheskoi istorii [Ancient Kievan Rus. Essays on socio-political history]. Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1987, p. 83.](https://edu.lvivcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Gerasimov.png)
