After Catherine II “the great” of Muscovy, died in 1796, among her papers, the ‘Reflections on the Project of History of Russia‘ written in French was discovered. A.F. Bychkov printed it in 1873 in St. Petersburg. As of now, a copy of that book is available on Archive.org. A better scan of the page about Dolgoruky can be found at the bottom of this article. In the ‘Reflections‘, among other things, Catherine II wrote down her true conclusions on Yuri Dolgoruky, the alleged founder of Moscow. In her work, she refers to him as Georges, which is the French version of the Slavic name Yury .
Yuri Dolgorukiy is recorded as Gurgy (Гюрги) in the Chronicle of Novgorod, possibly because he was a son of Volodymir II Monomakh with a Polovitzian princess and thus had a somewhat Asiatic name. Gurgy/ Georges/ Yury was the sixth son of Volodymir II, and here is what Catherine wrote:
“The most guilty of all the princes who preceded the arrival of the Tartars is, without a doubt, in my opinion, George, son of Vladimir II: having been unable to obtain Volhynia and Galicia for his appanage, he did not give a moment of rest to all the other appanages, his contemporaries, he spurred them on, one against the other, helping some to overcome others, and when he reduced some of them, he tried to attract the subjects of others into his possession.
His appanage had been assigned to him, or rather, he had been relegated to the Klesma River, behind Moscow; he established several towns there, which he named after those that had been refused to him in Volhynia. Among others, he named the one he settled in Vladimir, because Vladimir was the capital of Volhynia; he also gave himself the title of Grand Duke, which until then had only been given to a prince of the race, who sat in Kyiv. In imitation of George, all the appanages began to attribute to themselves the title of Grand Duke, and consequently ceased to obey as much as they could first to the race, to which basically they all made a war or declared it.”
As can be seen, Catherine II knew some true facts about interactions between Kyiv and the appanage that would later become Muscovy and then ‘Russia’. The whole Yury Dolgoruky story can serve as an illustration of Moscow’s politics toward Kyiv in the past 800 years – claiming something that does not belong to them to be theirs, and then simply making ugly copies and giving them the same names.
What Dolgoruky did with naming the town Vladimir, Muscovy later did with the name Rus. What Dolgoruky did by giving himself the Grand Duke title, Muscovy later did by giving itself the right of succession of Kyiv’s heritage.
Muscovy-‘Russia’ is exactly the same kind of impostor as Yury Dolgoruky was.
Another favorite Moscow game is making saints and heroes of the criminals. And that is the reason why one can never read Catherine’s words about Dolgoruky in any of the official Muscovite ‘history’ books.
Yury Dogoruky did not have much time for creative work – almost all the time he devoted to plotting and trying to get what he thought belonged to him. Historians counted that he alone made 12 assaults on Rus, some of them in alliance with the Polovtsy-Cumans. No wonder that when in 1157 Yury Dolgorukiy returned to Kyiv, he was poisoned – the Kyivans could not forgive him his raids.
Yuri’s first son from a Cuman woman, Andrey Bogolyubsky, continued his father’s efforts and tried to make raids into Rus land.
‘Gardariki, Ukraine‘ ebook has the facts proving that Yury Dolgoruky could NOT have founded Moscow in 1147.
