Across historiography, Pečenegs, Oğuz, Cuman-Qıpčaqs and other nomads have been cast within a binary: as either enemies of civilisation or manifesting cooperation between Rus’ and the Eurasian steppe. The former interpretation, common in Russian literature for centuries, plays into the standard Christian-versus-pagan dichotomy. The latter interpretation is newer, and became an essential component of the Eurasianist school of Soviet and post-Soviet historiography led by Lev Gumilëv, which has reflected recent ethnonational geopolitics.

The commonly accepted interpretation of steppe-nomads in traditional Russian historiography derives from the PVL, which depicts the Polovcÿ (Cuman-Qıpčaqs) in the entries for the years 1068, 1093 and 1096 as a ‘hostile force’ bent on invasion. Similarly, the sedentary and Christianised Russian narrative is presented by the compilers as demonstrating supremacy over steppe-nomads. When inserted into the Orthodox Christian template to explain pagan-nomad victories against Christians, it became a divine punishment, resembling Jordanes’ interpretation of Attila’s Huns. Regarded as the ‘Mongol yoke’, this interpretation survived into the Soviet period. So deeply held was this interpretation, that Gumilëv called it the ‘black legend’. Gumilëv’s concept of ‘Eurasianism’ advocates a primordial ethnic alliance between the ancient Rus’ and the steppe-nomads (Pečenegs, Cuman-Qıpčaqs, Oğuz, etc.). The traditional interpretation receded in the late Soviet period.

Gumilëv’s Eurasianism and theories of primordial ethnicity have become well established in current geopolitical relations within the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States (Kazakhstan’s Gumilëv Eurasian National University was refounded in 1996). Gumilëv reinterpreted the image of the alien steppe as a predominantly Western one and developed dual concepts of ‘ethnic chimera’ and ‘passionarity’ with the intention of fostering current transnational amity based on primordial ethnic identities.