A Family Tree Is Not a Title Deed: What UsefulCharts Gets Wrong About Russia and Ukraine
Matt Baker's history of Ukrainian and Russian monarchs contains genuine scholarship, avoidable factual errors, and a far more consequential problem: it makes the political inheritance of medieval Kyiv look considerably simpler than it was.
The trouble begins when a family tree starts doing the work of a historian.
In his UsefulCharts episode, Ukrainian & Russian Monarchs Family Tree | Rurik to Nicholas II, Baker traces approximately 1,200 years of rulers, from the legendary Viking Rurik to the execution of Russia's last emperor in 1918.
The presentation is orderly, accessible, and occasionally insightful. Baker correctly recognizes that medieval Kyiv belongs to the historical inheritance of Ukraine as well as Russia. He acknowledges uncertainty surrounding Rurik, disputes over early marriages, and the questionable origins of Monomakh's Cap.
Then, at several important moments, that caution disappears.
A cathedral is credited to the wrong ruler under the prevailing historical account. A prince's killing is attributed to the wrong political actor without acknowledging a substantial scholarly dispute. An inherited Byzantine family name becomes the result of a marriage. An imperial ideology receives an earlier and more definite origin than the evidence establishes.
These are not merely complaints about missing details. Each error or overstatement changes how viewers understand political authority, legitimacy, and historical succession.
The larger problem is the story holding the diagram together: the apparent movement of an ancient Rus inheritance toward Moscow and eventually the Russian Empire.
That history cannot be understood through genealogy alone.
The Cathedral That Changes Its Builder
Consider one of the easiest claims in the episode to check.
Discussing Vladimir the Great, Baker credits him with building Saint Sophia Cathedral, Kyiv's most famous medieval church.
The prevailing historical attribution is different.
UNESCO identifies the surviving cathedral as a monument constructed during the reign of Yaroslav the Wise, Vladimir's son.
The distinction is not obscure. In a major study published in the Journal of Medieval History in 1981, historian Andrzej Poppe argued that construction and decoration took place between 1037 and 1046, during Yaroslav's reign.
Vladimir certainly had an important architectural legacy. His earlier Church of the Tithes was a landmark of Christian building in Kyiv. But it was not Saint Sophia Cathedral.
There is a legitimate complication.
The precise construction date of Saint Sophia has been debated. Some researchers have argued for an earlier foundation, potentially during Vladimir's lifetime. A 2014 historiographical review by A. Domanovsky examined competing dates and concluded that the surviving evidence does not establish an uncontested foundation year.
That means the responsible conclusion is not that an earlier attribution is impossible.
It is that Baker presents a contested attribution as an established achievement, despite UNESCO and substantial historical scholarship identifying Yaroslav as the cathedral's builder.
Why does this matter?
Because Saint Sophia was not simply another medieval church.
It represented Kyiv's religious and cultural standing and the emergence of a sophisticated architectural tradition involving Byzantine and local craftsmen.
Moving its construction from Yaroslav to Vladimir changes how viewers understand the relationship between Christian conversion, cultural development, and royal patronage.
A family tree can identify father and son correctly while getting their achievements wrong.
The Prince Killed by an Empire—or by His Neighbors?
A more revealing problem appears in Baker's account of Sviatoslav I.
Following Sviatoslav's campaigns against Bulgaria, Baker says the prince was assassinated by the Byzantines.
That attribution requires substantially more caution.
Sviatoslav was killed in 972 while returning toward Kyiv. The actual attackers were Pechenegs, a powerful steppe people whose military and political interests frequently intersected with those of Rus and Byzantium.
The possibility that Byzantine diplomacy encouraged the attack has been discussed by historians.
But possibility is not proof.
In his 2021 scholarly monograph The Pechenegs: Nomads in the Political and Cultural Landscape of Medieval Europe, historian Aleksander Paroń examines the available evidence and rejects the theory that Constantinople organized Sviatoslav's killing.
Paroń points to the account of Byzantine historian John Skylitzes, which describes a diplomatic mission requesting safe passage for Sviatoslav.
He also identifies reasons the Pechenegs themselves might have wanted the prince dead, including earlier military conflicts, casualties, revenge, and concerns about expanding Rus power.
The evidence is not entirely unanimous. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine, for example, presents the attack as occurring at Byzantine instigation. That disagreement makes certainty particularly inappropriate.
Yet Baker's formulation simply makes Byzantium responsible.
What disappears is the Pechenegs' independent political agency.
They become instruments of a supposedly more important empire instead of a formidable regional power with interests of their own.
This is a small sentence with a substantial consequence.
It teaches viewers to imagine medieval Eastern Europe as a contest between recognizable states while overlooking the political independence of peoples who did not leave equally familiar royal dynasties.
The evidence identifies the killers. It does not establish Byzantine responsibility beyond dispute.
That difference belongs in the history.
When a Family Tree Gets the Family Relationship Wrong
Baker's account of Vladimir II Monomakh offers a particularly straightforward genealogical problem.
He explains Monomakh's name through a marriage to a Byzantine princess connected to Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos.
But historian Martin Dimnik, writing in the Encyclopedia of Russian History, identifies the source of Vladimir's name as his Greek mother, a relative of Constantine IX.
The Byzantine connection was maternal inheritance, not something originally acquired through marriage.
Vladimir's marriages were important in their own right. His connection to Gytha of Wessex, daughter of England's Harold Godwinson, linked the Rurikid dynasty to English royalty.
But those are separate relationships.
The distinction matters particularly in a video whose central attraction is genealogical accuracy.
Baker's diagrams are supposed to clarify which families inherited power, which marriages created political connections, and how rulers acquired dynastic legitimacy.
Confusing maternal ancestry with marriage undermines the very method on which the presentation depends.
It is not a catastrophic error.
It is an unusually revealing one.
The Moment Rus Becomes the Russian World
The most consequential weakness is not a mistaken date, name, or marriage.
It is the underlying historical framework.
Baker begins with an important concession: the early rulers of Kyiv cannot reasonably be claimed as exclusively Russian.
He then follows the fragmentation of Kievan Rus into different branches, concentrating on Galicia-Volhynia in the southwest and Vladimir-Suzdal in the northeast.
Eventually, as the northeastern territories gain political prominence, his language shifts toward the Russian world.
The shift sounds natural.
But it conceals a historical problem.
Medieval dynastic inheritance is not the same thing as the inheritance of a modern national identity.
The Rurikids governed territories whose inhabitants possessed different local, religious, linguistic, and political affiliations.
Their dynasty cannot simply be divided into two neat ancestral lines, one Ukrainian and the other Russian.
There is also a third modern national tradition largely missing from Baker's account: Belarus.
In The Origins of the Slavic Nations, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006, historian Serhii Plokhy challenges attempts to claim the medieval Rus past exclusively for modern national projects.
The book examines Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian identities and emphasizes that their development cannot be reduced to the inheritance of a single medieval people or the division of a royal family.
Historian Orest Subtelny, reviewing Plokhy's work in The American Historical Review, highlights a particularly important conclusion: applying modern national categories to the fluctuating identities of medieval Rus can do more harm than good.
Baker's shared-origin argument is therefore not fundamentally wrong.
Russia and Ukraine both possess substantial historical connections to medieval Rus. So does Belarus.
The problem arises when those connections appear to form an orderly sequence of national succession.
Consider what actually happened after the fragmentation of Rus.
Different centers claimed aspects of its political and cultural inheritance.
Galicia-Volhynia developed in the southwest.
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania eventually governed extensive Ruthenian territories.
Moscow consolidated power in the northeast.
Those centers did not merely represent branches of one family patiently awaiting reunification.
They developed different institutions, interests, relationships, and interpretations of political legitimacy.
There was no single inheritance certificate awarding the history of Kyiv to whichever dynasty eventually built the largest state.
Why this matters beyond medieval history
This is not an argument that the rulers of Kyiv were modern Ukrainians.
They were not modern Russians either.
Both conclusions would impose national identities from later centuries upon people who inhabited a substantially different political world.
The distinction has direct contemporary importance.
Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy has documented how Russian political narratives have used Kyiv's medieval history to support claims of historical unity and wider political authority.
In an interview published by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute, he discusses the modern Russian monument to Vladimir the Great and the importance of Kyiv's history to Russian national identity.
Plokhy's central concern is not whether Russia possesses a genuine connection to medieval Rus.
It plainly does.
The issue is what political claims are built upon that connection.
Baker does not argue that Russia owns Ukraine. His opening explicitly resists treating early Kyiv as exclusively Russian.
I find no basis in the episode for accusing him of knowingly promoting territorial conquest.
But that does not excuse the historical oversimplification.
An account can reject an imperial political conclusion while still reproducing part of the historical framework through which such conclusions have been justified.
A family connection establishes ancestry.
It does not establish ownership of another country's history, institutions, or territory.
Moscow's Third Rome: An Imperial Ambition Moved Backward in Time
Baker associates Ivan III's marriage into the Byzantine imperial family with Moscow's ambition to become the Third Rome.
There is a sound historical foundation beneath that account.
Ivan III strengthened Moscow's independence, expanded its power, married Sophia Palaiologina, a niece of the final Byzantine emperor, and adopted imperial symbolism.
But Baker goes further, presenting the Third Rome concept as something Ivan III himself wanted Moscow to become.
The evidence is less straightforward.
The best-known formulation of Moscow as the Third Rome emerged in the early sixteenth century, particularly through the writings attributed to the monk Filofei, or Philotheus, of Pskov.
That was after Ivan III's death in 1505.
The distinction is not merely chronological.
In a 2021 study published by Oxford University Press, scholar Nick Mayhew examines the original Third Rome texts and challenges the assumption that they necessarily represented an established program of imperial expansion.
Their meaning could be religious and defensive, emphasizing Moscow's responsibility to preserve what their authors regarded as authentic Orthodox Christianity.
Mayhew also questions the tendency of later historians to exaggerate the concept's importance in early Muscovite political ideology.
Baker effectively compresses several developments into one continuous imperial ambition.
Byzantium falls.
Moscow claims its inheritance.
Ivan III becomes an imperial successor.
The Third Rome emerges as the logical result.
That is an appealing narrative.
It is also too tidy.
A later ideological formulation cannot automatically be attributed to an earlier ruler simply because his actions fit the story.
The distinction matters because historical explanations often become most misleading when they make the eventual outcome appear inevitable.
Ukraine: Borderland of What, Exactly?
Another revealing simplification concerns the country's name.
Baker explains Ukraine as meaning borderlands and connects the name to the division between Catholic West Slavs and predominantly Orthodox East Slavs.
The borderland interpretation has substantial historical support.
But presenting it as the name's only meaning, and then explaining it through a simple religious boundary, leaves out important linguistic and historical questions.
In The Promise of Ukraine: A Conceptual History of Nineteenth-Century Nationalism, published by Oxford University Press in April 2026, historian Anton Kotenko examines how the meaning of Ukraine developed over time.
Kotenko identifies possible historical meanings including borderland and country, while distinguishing the medieval word from the much later political concept of a modern Ukrainian nation.
Even when borderland is the appropriate translation, one question remains:
Whose borderland?
A border is not a permanent characteristic of a people.
It is a relationship between territories and political centers.
A region described as peripheral from Warsaw, Vilnius, or Moscow may be central to the people living there.
The historical use of borderland language therefore requires a location, a period, and a political perspective.
It cannot be adequately explained through a timeless division between Catholic and Orthodox Slavs.
The actual history includes shifting frontiers, mixed religious communities, changing rulers, and overlapping identities.
There is nothing wrong with explaining an unfamiliar name through its etymology.
The mistake is allowing an etymology to substitute for a history.
The Ukrainian State That Disappears in One Sentence
Perhaps the greatest omission comes much later.
After discussing Galicia-Volhynia and Polish-Lithuanian control, Baker briefly mentions the emergence of a semi-independent Cossack state.
He then explains that this state was gradually absorbed into the Russian Empire.
That description is not entirely false.
It is considerably less informative than the events themselves.
The Cossack Hetmanate emerged in 1648 under Bohdan Khmelnytsky following an uprising against Polish rule.
It developed its own military, political leadership, and governing institutions.
The 1654 Pereiaslav agreement placed it in a relationship of dependence upon Moscow, but the precise nature of that relationship and the rights retained by the Hetmanate became subjects of continuing conflict.
The territory was subsequently divided between competing powers, while its political autonomy faced increasing restrictions.
These were not simply episodes in the orderly expansion of one state.
They were struggles over the survival and authority of another.
Under Catherine II, the process reached a decisive stage.
In 1764, Catherine forced Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovsky to resign, ending the office through which much of the remaining Cossack autonomy had been exercised.
In 1775, Russian troops destroyed the Zaporozhian Sich, the fortified center of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.
The Encyclopedia of Ukraine records that approximately 10,000 Zaporozhians fled to Ottoman territory, while other Cossacks were incorporated into new military and social arrangements.
Their lands were absorbed into imperial administrative structures and distributed among landowners.
This is what Baker's description of gradual absorption fails to communicate.
There were political agreements.
There were broken expectations.
There was the restriction of autonomous institutions.
There was military destruction.
There were people who lost their political independence and others who fled.
These facts are particularly important because Baker later discusses Catherine the Great's territorial expansion and cultural achievements.
The same ruler celebrated for enlarging the Russian Empire was also responsible for abolishing important institutions of Ukrainian self-government.
Both belong in an account of how the empire acquired its territories.
A genealogy naturally concentrates on the families who governed.
But when a history of monarchy neglects the institutions those monarchs dismantled, conquest can begin to resemble inheritance.
That is not a harmless simplification.
It changes the political meaning of the events.
Catherine the Great: An Assassination Becomes a Proven Conspiracy
Baker makes another assertion about Catherine II that demonstrates the danger of treating historical suspicion as established fact.
He states that Catherine had her husband Peter III killed so that she could take the throne.
There is no dispute that Catherine overthrew Peter in 1762.
There is also no dispute that Peter died shortly afterward under suspicious circumstances.
What remains uncertain is Catherine's personal responsibility for ordering his death.
A historical examination published by Smithsonian Magazine in May 2020, drawing on the work of historian Simon Sebag Montefiore and other scholarship, describes competing explanations for Peter's death.
It also notes that conclusive evidence directly linking Catherine to the killing has not been established.
The chronology matters.
Catherine had already seized power before Peter died.
His death helped secure her position, but the claim that she arranged his murder specifically to take the throne requires proof beyond the fact that she benefited.
Political benefit is evidence of a possible motive.
It is not evidence that the beneficiary ordered the killing.
That distinction would be elementary in a modern investigation.
It should not disappear merely because the suspected crime occurred in the eighteenth century.
A historian can reasonably describe Peter's suspicious death and Catherine's political advantage without pretending the historical record supplies a conclusive verdict.
Baker chooses the verdict.
The evidence warrants greater restraint.
The Problem With History That Fits Too Perfectly
The strongest defense of Baker's work is obvious.
This is a family-tree video, not a university course.
Its purpose is to explain centuries of dynastic relationships through a visual diagram. It cannot address every scholarly controversy, ethnic identity, political institution, or regional conflict.
That defense deserves consideration.
Baker also acknowledges uncertainty in several places. His discussion of Rurik's legendary origins, the questionable history of Monomakh's Cap, and disputed Byzantine ancestry demonstrates an understanding that medieval evidence is often incomplete.
Nor does the research undermine his basic claim that Russian and Ukrainian history share important medieval foundations.
They do.
But a short presentation still has to distinguish what is established from what is disputed.
It takes very little time to say that the Pechenegs killed Sviatoslav and that Byzantine involvement is debated.
It takes no additional historical theory to distinguish Monomakh's maternal ancestry from marriage.
It requires only a more accurate sentence to explain that Saint Sophia is generally attributed to Yaroslav, although its construction chronology remains disputed.
And it would transform the account of Ukrainian history to replace the vague language of absorption with the concrete facts of the Hetmanate's abolition and the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich.
Brevity does not require those distinctions to disappear.
More importantly, a visual genealogy creates its own editorial risks.
Names connected by lines give an impression of continuity.
Successive rulers make power appear transferable.
A family that produces another ruling family can make political authority appear to pass naturally from one territory to another.
But governments are not inherited in the same way as genes.
A dynasty may survive while its institutions change completely.
A ruler may inherit a title while acquiring territory through military conquest.
A family relationship may justify a political claim without making that claim legitimate.
And people living under the resulting government may reject the authority that their rulers believe genealogy has established.
These are not minor exceptions to medieval and imperial history.
They are central to understanding it.
The Verdict: A Good Diagram Can Still Tell a Bad History
Baker's episode succeeds at something genuinely difficult: making approximately twelve centuries of dynastic relationships understandable to viewers who might otherwise never encounter the subject.
But accessibility is not immunity from scrutiny.
His account becomes unreliable where it exchanges uncertainty for certainty, confuses specific genealogical relationships, or compresses political struggles into an apparently natural sequence of rulers.
The problems are not equally serious.
The Monomakh mistake is a genealogical error.
The Saint Sophia attribution conflicts with the prevailing account while overlooking a legitimate scholarly dispute.
The Byzantine assassination claim assigns responsibility without sufficient qualification.
The Third Rome explanation projects a later ideological formulation onto an earlier ruler.
The treatment of the Cossack Hetmanate removes some of the most revealing evidence about how Russian imperial authority actually expanded.
And the larger framework encourages readers to understand medieval Rus primarily through the later political histories of Ukraine and Russia, rather than through the complex identities and institutions of the medieval world itself.
I would not accuse Baker of deliberately manufacturing Russian imperial history. The evidence does not establish that intention, and his opening rejection of an exclusively Russian Kyiv is important.
The criticism does not need such an accusation.
The facts are sufficient.
A family tree can establish that rulers were related. It cannot, by itself, establish that one state rightfully inherited another state's history.
That distinction is especially important when discussing Kyiv, Moscow, and the origins of modern Eastern Europe.
The people who governed medieval Rus did not know that future generations would divide their legacy among modern nations.
They could not have anticipated the political claims those nations would eventually make.
Their family relationships are part of the historical record.
They are not a substitute for it.
The failure of Baker's account is not that it recognizes a shared past. It is that it makes the struggle over that past look simpler, cleaner, and more settled than the evidence permits.
History deserves better than a line drawn between two names.
References
1. Original work — Matt Baker, Ukrainian & Russian Monarchs Family Tree | Rurik to Nicholas II. UsefulCharts, publication date not independently established.
The original presentation establishes Baker's account of dynastic succession, his historical attributions, and his treatment of the relationship between medieval Rus and modern Russia and Ukraine.
2. UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Kyiv: Saint-Sophia Cathedral and Related Monastic Buildings, Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra.
UNESCO identifies Saint Sophia Cathedral as a monument constructed during Yaroslav the Wise's reign, contradicting Baker's unqualified attribution to Vladimir.
3. Andrzej Poppe — The Building of the Church of St Sophia in Kiev. Journal of Medieval History, March 1981.
Poppe's historical analysis places the cathedral's construction between 1037 and 1046 and distinguishes Yaroslav's building program from Vladimir's earlier church construction.
4. A. Domanovsky — St. Sophia of Kyiv Cathedral's Millennium in Contemporary Ukrainian Historiography. V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, 2014.
Domanovsky examines conflicting construction dates and demonstrates why the cathedral's precise foundation chronology remains disputed.
5. Aleksander Paroń — The Pechenegs: Nomads in the Political and Cultural Landscape of Medieval Europe. Brill, 2021.
Paroń analyzes the primary evidence surrounding Sviatoslav's death and argues against attributing the Pecheneg attack to Byzantine direction; the historical record does not establish the attack's instigator with universal scholarly agreement.
6. Martin Dimnik — Vladimir Monomakh. Encyclopedia of Russian History, publication date not specified.
Dimnik identifies Vladimir's Greek mother as the source of his Monomakh name, correcting the genealogical relationship described in Baker's presentation.
7. Serhii Plokhy — The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
View the book and its contents
Plokhy examines the development of East Slavic identities and challenges the projection of modern national categories onto the medieval Rus world.
8. Orest Subtelny — Review of The Origins of the Slavic Nations. The American Historical Review, February 2008.
Subtelny explains Plokhy's argument that medieval Rus identities were too fluid to be understood adequately through later Russian, Ukrainian, or Belarusian national categories.
9. Nick Mayhew — Moscow: The Third Rome. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, May 26, 2021.
Read the Oxford research entry
Mayhew examines the later development and competing meanings of the Third Rome idea, complicating its presentation as a clearly established imperial program under Ivan III.
10. Anton Kotenko — The Promise of Ukraine: A Conceptual History of Nineteenth-Century Nationalism. Oxford University Press, April 20, 2026.
Kotenko distinguishes the medieval meanings of Ukraine from the later political concept of a Ukrainian nation, demonstrating why etymology alone cannot explain national history.
11. Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine — Hetman State. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, publication date not specified.
The entry documents the Hetmanate's political institutions, relationship with Moscow, territorial divisions, and progressive loss of sovereignty.
12. Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine — Zaporizhia, The. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, publication date not specified.
This account records the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775, subsequent population movements, and the incorporation of Cossack territory into Russian imperial structures.
13. Meilan Solly — The True Story of Catherine the Great. Smithsonian Magazine, May 15, 2020.
Read the historical examination
The article distinguishes Catherine's documented overthrow of Peter III from the unresolved question of whether she personally ordered his death.
14. Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute — Contextualizing Putin's "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians". August 2, 2021.
Read the historical interview and analysis
The institute's interview with Serhii Plokhy explains how competing interpretations of medieval Kyiv's inheritance have influenced modern Russian identity and political claims.