Russia or Moscovia: Why We Call Countries the Way We Do
We don’t always call countries the same way their population does. And I don’t mean natural phonetic distortions, but actually different historical roots.
There are multiple examples of this in English: Germany, Hungary, Georgia, Armenia, Greece, Finland, India, Egypt, Morocco, Wales, Albania, Montenegro. And similar practice exists around the world.
Germany arguably has the largest variety of names. In German, the country is called Deutschland, which is derived from Teutonia. The country’s name has the same root in most Germanic languages, and also, for example, in Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese. In many languages the name is derived from Germania or Alemannia. Finnish and Estonian names are derived from Saxonia: Saksa and Saksamaa respectively. Slavic languages use the root nem, nim or niem (like Niemcy in Polish), and the Hungarians borrowed it as well (Németország). The name Prussia can also be found sometimes, and in Lithuanian and Latvian it’s Vokietija and Vācija respectively.
The Hungarians call themselves Magyar, and their country, Magyarország. This root is used by some Slavs, in particular the Czechs and Slovaks (Maďarsko). However, most languages use the names derived from the Greek-Latin Hungaria, which sometimes gets distorted so it’s hard to recognize, like in the case of Węgry in Polish.
Georgia, as well as the Russian version Gruziya, stems from an Old Persian root. The Georgians themselves call their country Sakartvelo and really want others to use this name too. Their neighbors Armenians call the country Vrastan.
In their turn, the Georgians call Armenia Somkhet’i, while the endonym (native name) is Hayastan. However, most languages use the names that stem from the Greek-Latin Armenia.
The endonym of the country known in many languages as Greece (Griechenland etc) is Ellada, or Hellas (this name is used, for example, in Norwegian). Some languages use the names derived from Ionia (like Yunanistan in Turkish). And in Georgia/Sakartvelo this country is known as Saberdzneti.
The Finns call their country Suomi. This name is used mostly in cognate languages like Estonian (Soome), but most of the world knows the country under its Germanic name Finland. And this name is used in Swedish, which is the second official language in the country.
The Finns, however, like their Estonian relatives, in return call Sweden Ruotsi and Rootsi respectively.
Since English is one of India’s official languages, this name is mentioned in the country’s Constitution. However, in Hindi and most other Indian languages the name is Bhārat (or its variations).
The name Egypt has Greek origin, while the native name is Miṣr (or Maṣr in Egyptian Arabic pronunciation).
The name Morocco is derived from the city of Marrakesh, while the endonym is al-Maghrib, and in Turkish the country is known as Fas.
The land known in English as Wales is called Cymru in Welsh (hence the Latin Cambria). In some languages the Welsh are called Gauls, and so the country is known as Galles (in Italian), Gales (in Spanish), Galler (in Turkish), etc.
The name Albania that is traditionally used in many languages has Latin origin. The Albanians themselves call their land Shqipëria. In Turkish it’s Arnavutluk.
The name China is a substantially distorted form of the endonym Zhōngguó. Some languages use variations of the name Cathay (Kitay in Russian and Bulgarian, Kitajska in Slovenian, Khyatad in Mongolian, etc).
Austria is the Latin version of the root Öster from the country’s German name Österreich, and this name is used around the world. However, the Austrians’ neighbors Czechs and Slovaks call the country Rakousko and Rakúsko respectively, and the Finns call it Itävalta.
Italy is an almost universal name, but the Poles decided to call the country Włochy.
Poland itself, in addition to the Latinized form Polonia, has also names that originate from Lechia like Lengyelország (in Hungarian), Lenkija (in Lithuanian), or Lahestan (in Persian).
Some other well-known examples are how in many countries Myanmar is still called Burma, and the Netherlands are still called Holland. In the case of the Netherlands it’s also interesting how in some languages the country’s name is translated literally like Pays-Bas in French or Nizozemsko in Czech.
The African country Côte d’Ivoire is also often translated: Ivory Coast in English, Elfenbeinküste in German, Pobřeží slonoviny in Czech, etc.
Montenegro is another country that encountered translations. In fact, Montenegro is the Italian translation of the endonym Crna Gora which means “Black Mountain”. Some other nations use their own translations, like the Turkish Karadağ.
As can be seen, we often use traditional, historical names of countries without giving much thought to it.
Sometimes we do switch to a name preferred by a country’s population, but it’s always hard to break our centuries-old habits.
In addition to the above-mentioned Myanmar, the Netherlands, and Georgia/Sakartvelo, we can note the recent request of Turkey to use the name Türkiye in English, the Czech Republic’s adoption of Czechia as its short official English name, the renaming of Swaziland to Eswatini, and the use of the name Belarus instead of Weißrussland and Hviterussland (literally “White Russia”) in German and Norwegian respectively.
There was also the renaming of Macedonia to North Macedonia after long disputes with Greece, and the campaign to abandon the article that denies any logical explanation in the case of Ukraine (“the Ukraine”). Or we can even mention the Romani, or the Roma, a stateless nation, who are still called in many languages by the names like Gypsies, Tzigane, or Gitano which are sometimes viewed as pejorative.
But a name change can also be fateful and define history for centuries to come.
This was the case with the country known today as Russia.
The country that formed around Moscow, first as the Grand Duchy of Moscow, and then as the Tsardom of Moscow, for centuries was widely known as Moscovia, or Muscovy. But in 1721, Peter the Great proclaimed the creation of the Russian Empire and once and for all established Russia (or Rossiya) as the country’s official name, which gradually crept into other languages.
With this change Peter the Great claimed that his country was the heir to Kyivan Rus’, or Ruthenia. To be clear, previous Muscovite tsars had already made such claims, but with this reform he went a step further.
Kyivan Rus’ was a political union of many tribes that are collectively known as Eastern Slavs with the center in Kyiv. There were also other Slavic tribes, known as Western and Southern Slavs, that were happy enough to stay outside of this union and went their own ways.
Soon after Kyivan Rus’ ceased to exist, a large part of its lands came under the control of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. After the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, those Eastern Slavs who remained under the influence of Lithuania formed the basis for what is now known as the Belarusian people, and those who were under the influence of Poland formed the basis for what is now known as the Ukrainian people.
In the east, some Slavs formed a new union with the center in the newly-built city of Moscow. These Slavs became the basis for what is today known as the Russian people.
Later, Moscovia would conquer a large part of what is today known as Ukraine, but at the time the differences between the nations, their languages and traditions were already so pronounced that centuries of Muscovite rule couldn’t reverse the process of the national individuation of the Ukrainians.
There are other examples of similar “geographic shifts” when it comes to country names.
White Croatia, or Great Croatia, the motherland of the Croats, existed in parts of modern Western Ukraine, Poland, and Czechia, but modern Croatia doesn’t claim those lands, and everyone is happy.
Today’s Bulgarians are partly related to the Bulgars who inhabited the Pontic-Caspian steppe and the Volga region and at some point formed Old Great Bulgaria that included parts of Russia and Southern Ukraine, but modern Bulgaria doesn’t claim those lands, and everyone is happy.
The name of Romania refers to the Ancient Roman heritage, but the country has no plans of occupying Rome or restoring the Roman Empire, and everyone is happy.
Thus, the problem with Russia is that it does claim other countries’ lands and uses the cognation of its name with Rus’/Ruthenia as one of the arguments. (Needless to say, dynastic arguments or other attempts to find some “sacred lineage” are also pointless because if everyone used the same logic, there would be chaos in Europe.)
Russians also don’t like when someone calls them by other names, condemning the exonym Moskals as pejorative. However, it was a traditional name for the people of Moscovia used by Ukrainians and Poles. There was nothing pejorative in the name: it has the root mosk as in Moscovia, and the suffix -al which can be seen as analogous to English -er and is used in words describing people or professions like koval (smith), skrypal (violinist; by the way, do you remember the Skripal case?), or the Polish ethnic group Górals.
This suffix is less common in Russian and can be found in the word khakhal (dandy or fop) that today has a pejorative undertone, but it doesn’t mean it implies any offense in other languages. In fact, Slavic names for the Germans (niemets/nimets/niemec etc) are much more pejorative because they mean someone who is dumb, or mute, that is, a barbarian who can’t speak an intelligible language, but I have yet to see any German who feels offended by that.
Therefore, when we use the terms “Russia” and “Russian”, it’s as if we implicitly recognize the country’s right to the Ruthenian heritage and reinforce its imperialistic ambitions.
I know expecting the world to switch to using Moscovia/Muscovy instead is asking for the impossible, but at least it’s important to bring this into awareness because people around the world often don’t know the difference between “Russia” and Rus’/Ruthenia and between “Russian” and Ruthenian, and sometimes this difference isn’t even clearly defined in their languages.
For example, in Polish, similarly to Ukrainian, rosyjski means Russian and ruski means Ruthenian, but many Poles perceive these words as synonymous. Until recently, you could see pierogi ruskie (Ruthenian pierogi, the ones coming from Red Ruthenia, that is, Western Ukraine) translated as “Russian pierogi” in Polish restaurants, and after the start of the current full-scale stage of the war they have been often renamed to pierogi ukraińskie (Ukrainian pierogi) — this turned out to be easier than trying to explain that pierogi ruskie have no connection to Russia.
The Finns and Estonians are rare nations that don’t use the root rus or ros and call Russia Venäjä and Venemaa respectively, but even here the devil is in the details, because they apply the same root, which is derived from Veneti, to Kyivan Rus’: Kiovan Venäjä and Kiievi-Vene. Similarly, in Latvian Russia is called Krievija, but Kyivan Rus’ is Kijivas Krievzeme.
When we speak without realizing why we use the words we use, what they really mean, and where they come from, we are allowing these words to manipulate us and to shape our thoughts and views. “If X sounds similar to Y, then X must have rights to Y” is a flawed logic.
Note: This article is loosely based on my post in Ukrainian published here.