Where was Russia born?

A hundred years ago, the revolution swept Russia from the imperial age to the communist era from the centuries of the Cares to the Soviet red stars.

In St Petersburg, extravagant palaces remember the life - style of the Russian emperors, while in Moscow, hard Rocks are reminders of a fiery existence under dictatorial rule.

Although the Russians have found themselves at a crossroads between these two major stages of their nation's history for a century, many are still at odds with each other over that period and which city had the greatest impact on today's Russian culture and sparked deep patriotism.

But while residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg argue whether it was the Soviets or the Czars who sown the seed of nationalism, residents of Velikj Novgorod (just known as Novgorod) insist they were Vikings.

At first glance, Novgorod (standing close to 200km south of St Petersburg, along the Volkhov River), appears to be a ukrorrarian in the times of the Soviet Union.

Just inside the “Kremlin” of fortified Novgorod one of the oldest fortified castles in Russia you get a sense of the historic importance of this country.

This, the Newgorodians say, is where Russia was born.

In the 9th century, Novgorod was a successful trading settlement along a large Varangian range (medieval to Vikings) between Scandinavian and Greece. Traders exchanged fabrics, metals, wines, and amber from the Mediterranean for luxury wool, for which Novgorod was famous.

However, it was a land without law, and fighting was common among the Neworodians and other communities nearby.

Seeking to establish order, the Novgorodians invited the powerful chief Varangian, Prince Ruric, to establish a righteous government. Ruriku was forced to travel from Utah (nowDenmarca) to take control of the city in 862.

After Rurik's death in 879, his brother, Oleg, took power and expanded the empire, occupying the land north of what would later become St. Petersburg and south as Kiev (more than 1,000km from Novgorod) and uniting tribes around the Slavic and Finnish lands to form the Russian state of Kiev.

Novgorod progressed, and thanks to a large degree of autonomy given, the city was free to develop its legislative systems; its leaders were chosen and served long-term borders on what was the first democratic government within the region we now call Russia.

Today the medieval walls of the red bricks of the Novgorod Kremlin, a World Heritage site of U NESTO, they have the home of the United Museum of the State of Novgorod, featuring exhibitions and artefacts detailing the city's history and the yard of Yaroslav, the former locale of a wide 16th century market. At the heart of the Kremlin is the Millennium Monument of the Russian State, over which a sculpture of Prince Rurik stands at the top.

“Rurik in contemporary Russia is a type of symbolic figure with a circle of myths concentrated around it”, said Adrian Selin, senior professor and researcher at the Department of History at St Petersburg High Economics School.

In time, Rurik has become such a symbolic legend that the Soviet Union had not documented him as the founder of Russia, going so far as to claim that he was a book invention.

“[Soviet authorities] refused to be a real person, because the pronunciation of his name, sounds German or Scandinavian, not Slav, as modern Russians identified,” She explained Celine.