" Both Ukrainian and Russian historians treat Kievan Rus' as an integral part of their respective national histories. As might be expected, the question of who has the greater right to claim its heritage often arises. Traditional Russian historians, especially those influenced by the 19th-century Juridical School, argued that because Russians were the only East Slavs to create a state in modern times (the evolution of statehood was viewed by them as the pinnacle of the historical process), the Muscovite-Russian state's link with the earliest East Slavic state was the most consistent and significant. By implication, because Ukrainians and Belorussians had no modern state of their own, their histories had no institutional bonds with the Kievan period. The influential 19th-century Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin went even further and claimed that Russian ties with Kiev were not only institutional, but also ethnic.3 According to his theory, after the Mongol destruction of Kiev in 1240, much of the surviving populace migrated from the south to the northeast, the heartland of modern Russia. Although this theory has long since been discredited, it still enjoys support among many Russian and non-Russian historians.

As the national consciousness of Ukrainians grew in the 19th century, so too did their resentment of Russian monopolization of the "glory that was Kiev." The most forceful argument against the "traditional scheme of Russian history" was advanced in 1906 by Hrushevsky, Ukraine's most eminent historian. Thoroughgoing populist that he was, Hrushevsky questioned the study of history primarily in terms of the state-building process… Just as Gaul, once a Roman province and now modern-day France, borrowed much of its sociopolitical organization, laws, and culture from Rome, so too did Moscow with regard to Kiev. But Moscow was not a continuation, or a second stage in the historical process begun in Kiev…

Soviet historians take what appears to be a compromise position on the issue of the Kievan legacy. They argue that Kiev was the creation of all three East Slavic peoples - the Ukrainians, Russians, and Belorussians. "

― Orest Subtelny , Ukraine: A History