- 1 week ago
From Vikings to Wagner: 1,000 years of killing for rubles in Russia’s quest for power.
👉 What World Leaders NEED to Know about Russia: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6d9EIByxz1AdkmIOYUlrDd0rmByq5zSN
For over a thousand years, Russia’s rulers have bought violence when loyalty ran dry. From Viking raiders and Cossack warlords to the shadow armies of Wagner, the nation’s power has been built — and threatened — by men who kill for pay. In this video, Elvira Bary exposes the dark history of Russia’s mercenary tradition, revealing how the same pattern has shaped the state from medieval battlefields to modern warzones.
Video Chapters:
00:00 Killing for Rubles
01:04 Mercenaries, Princes, and the Price of Violence
05:43 The Rise of the Regular Army
12:51 Mercenaries in the Age of the Superpowers
15:16 The Wagner Group
18:12 The Mercenaries in Ukraine
21:28 The White Ghosts
👉 JOIN ME ON THE JOURNEY Sign-up for news about the New Book here: https://elvirabary.com/elvira-barys-newsletter/
MY HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK SERIES
➡️ Russian Treasures (a historical novel about the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War) https://amzn.to/43PutaM
➡️ The White Ghosts' Empire (a histo
👉 What World Leaders NEED to Know about Russia: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6d9EIByxz1AdkmIOYUlrDd0rmByq5zSN
For over a thousand years, Russia’s rulers have bought violence when loyalty ran dry. From Viking raiders and Cossack warlords to the shadow armies of Wagner, the nation’s power has been built — and threatened — by men who kill for pay. In this video, Elvira Bary exposes the dark history of Russia’s mercenary tradition, revealing how the same pattern has shaped the state from medieval battlefields to modern warzones.
Video Chapters:
00:00 Killing for Rubles
01:04 Mercenaries, Princes, and the Price of Violence
05:43 The Rise of the Regular Army
12:51 Mercenaries in the Age of the Superpowers
15:16 The Wagner Group
18:12 The Mercenaries in Ukraine
21:28 The White Ghosts
👉 JOIN ME ON THE JOURNEY Sign-up for news about the New Book here: https://elvirabary.com/elvira-barys-newsletter/
MY HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK SERIES
➡️ Russian Treasures (a historical novel about the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War) https://amzn.to/43PutaM
➡️ The White Ghosts' Empire (a histo
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00They call it service, they call it patriotism, but in Russia there is an older true name
00:07for it – killing for rubles.
00:09From the battlefields of Ukraine to the deserts of Africa, Russian men fight under many banners
00:16– Wagner, Redout, Stormzy – but the idea is always the same.
00:20When the state runs out of loyalty, it buys violence.
00:24And this is no modern invention.
00:27For over a thousand years, Russian rulers have hired outsiders and outcasts – Viking
00:34raiders, pirate bands, and Cossack warlords.
00:38Their names changed, their flags changed, their weapons changed – but the pattern – that
00:44never did.
00:45Today, we are going to open a door the Kremlin would rather keep shut to show you how mercenaries
00:51built Russia's power and why they could one day bring it down.
00:56I am Elvira Berry, a writer born in the Soviet Union, and this is the dark history of Russia's
01:03mercenary tradition.
01:08The Russian state began not as a homeland, but as a business.
01:14Long before it became a nation, it was a trade network, and that network could be exploited.
01:21In the 9th century, a new kind of raider began slipping down the rivers of Eastern Europe.
01:27They weren't settlers.
01:29They weren't missionaries.
01:31They were professional crews, hired men, armed to the teeth, who rowed their long ships like
01:39mobile war machines.
01:40They came for silver, for fur, for tribute.
01:44They were called roos – a word that simply meant rowers.
01:49Their business model was simple – invest in a boat, hire a crew, raid a few villages, split
01:56the loot.
01:57Occasionally, instead of pillaging, they offered their services to a town or tribe – protection
02:03in exchange for grain, influence, and women.
02:06The most successful didn't just live with loot.
02:09They stayed married into local elites and crowned themselves princes.
02:15Others were less fortunate.
02:18Dispossessed in war, disinherited sons or men with no claim to land.
02:23This unwanted princess took up the sword for hire, becoming mercenaries.
02:28One of the most striking examples is Prince Ivan Berladnik, a dispossessed noble who spent
02:36over a decade fighting for hire.
02:38He and his small army moved from one lord to another, fighting for Svetoslav Olygovich,
02:45then Rostislav of Smolensk, then Yuri Dolgoruky.
02:50When Yuri needed help collecting taxes in rebellious Novgorod, he sent Berladnik and his men north.
02:57Medieval chronicles even coined a term for him – a service prince, a noble not tied
03:04to land, but to contracts.
03:08Cities like Novgorod and Pskov took this logic a step further.
03:12They didn't inherit princes, they hired them.
03:16Each prince signed a contract, outlined how many soldiers he would bring, how much he'd
03:22be paid, and how long he could stay.
03:25When the contract expired, or the prince overstepped, he was dismissed.
03:31Just like a freelance commander in Renaissance Italy.
03:35After the Mongol invasion, Russia's frontier became a constant war zone.
03:41Raids swept up from the steppes and forests, burning villages and stealing people into slavery.
03:47The Tsars needed defenders.
03:50But they didn't want to spend money on full-time armies, so they outsourced the job to the Cossacks.
03:58The Cossacks were frontier adventurers – Slavs, Tatars, runaway serfs, even criminals who formed
04:06loose, self-governing warrior bands.
04:09They built boats, stockpiled grain, and raided for plunder.
04:14Their code was independence, their currency was violence.
04:19And they made a deal with Moscow – we'll protect your borders, but don't tell us how to live.
04:26The state agreed – Cossacks got land, weapons, and tax exemptions.
04:33In return, they patrolled the rivers and the steppes, guarding against invaders.
04:39But they remained their own bosses, and more than once they turned their weapons against the Tsars themselves.
04:48The most famous of them all – Yermak Timofievich, who lived in the 16th century.
04:54He was not hired by a Tsar.
04:56He was hired by merchants.
04:59The Strogonov family sold magnates from the Urals.
05:02Their trade routes were under attack, and the government offered little help.
05:08So, the Strogonovs funded a private expedition.
05:12They gave Yermak boots, weapons, men, and provisions, and told him to conquer Siberia.
05:19He did.
05:20In 1582, Yermak crushed the army of Kuchumkan and opened the gates to Siberia's vast wealth.
05:28Only after his victory did Ivan the Terrible claim the conquest in the name of Russia.
05:34Much like how the Spanish, backed partly by the crown and partly by private investors, laid claim to the Americas.
05:43The rise of their regular army
05:47For centuries, Russia's wars were fought by men who owed nothing to the land they defended, or the land they
05:54conquered.
05:55They served for silver, for plunder, or for the vague promise of favor from some higher power.
06:02The early Russian state, like so many medieval kingdoms, didn't rely on mass mobilization.
06:08It relied on contracts.
06:10But two forces reshaped the very soul of warfare.
06:15Not just in Russia, but across Europe.
06:18The first was gunpowder.
06:21It transformed the battlefield.
06:23Wars no longer hinged on fast raids or brutal ambushes.
06:28They demanded coordination, firepower, and logistics.
06:33A thousand well-drilled musketeers could defeat 10,000 disorganized swordsmen.
06:40Suddenly, the very thing that made mercenaries valuable – mobility, independence, and ruthlessness – became a liability.
06:49They lacked discipline.
06:51They followed the money, not the plan.
06:54And when the pay ran out, they turned on their employers.
06:59Or simply walked away?
07:01The second shift happened in the mind.
07:05In Western Europe, the Protestant Reformation sparked religious wars that demanded mass loyalty.
07:12People no longer fought only for gold or survival.
07:16They fought for God.
07:18And later, they began fighting for new abstract ideas – freedom, equality, and national identity.
07:27It turned out that belief was a far better motivator than money.
07:31Belief lasts longer, spreads faster, and binds men together more tightly than any contract.
07:38And when belief was combined with gunpowder and industrial logistics, it changed who won wars and who ruled empires.
07:48If rulers wanted to stay in power, they had to build complicated war machines.
07:55Machines powered by technology, coordinated by strict hierarchies, and fueled by shared ideologies – ideologies that transcended personal gain.
08:06Russia faced the same challenge, and it sought the most pragmatic and cheapest solution.
08:13The Streltsy, the Tsar's private guard paid directly from the treasury, proved unreliable.
08:21Mutinies erupted often, so under Peter the Great, a new kind of soldier emerged.
08:27Not a raider, not a nobleman's servant, but a cog in a machine.
08:33He was taken from his family, often for life.
08:36The state stripped him of individuality.
08:39The soldiers wore identical uniforms.
08:41They marched in perfect formation.
08:44They weren't expected to take initiative.
08:47They were expected to obey.
08:50And their loyalty was no longer to a warlord.
08:53It was to an idea.
08:56In Russia, that idea was a mix of the Orthodox faith, the Tsar as a symbol of national unity, and
09:04the motherland.
09:05By the 19th century, the Russian Empire could fill armies on a scale that would have stunned any medieval ruler.
09:13With the largest pool of potential conscripts in Europe, an almost endless supply of raw materials, and a political culture
09:22rooted in internal violence and fear,
09:25this army became one of the most intimidating forces on the continent.
09:32In the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, Russia began to lose wars when it
09:41faced better equipped opponents.
09:43The Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, yet against weaker, less industrialized enemies, like the Ottoman Empire, Qing China, or
09:55Central Asian states, the scale of Russia's war machine was more than enough.
10:00The Bolsheviks inherited this machine.
10:04Initially, they lacked both money and specialists to modernize it.
10:09So, they invested in ideology.
10:11They understood something crucial.
10:14If you want people to die for you, don't just feed and arm them.
10:19Give them a story.
10:21The Red Army was not just a military force.
10:25It was the armed wing of a dream.
10:28A dream that history had a direction and that its soldiers were the chosen instruments to carry it forward.
10:37Once again, belief replaced pay.
10:41Stalin poured resources into modernizing the army, arming it with the best technology the Soviet state could produce.
10:50For a time, it worked.
10:52The full weight of the largest country on Earth was thrown behind its military.
10:57But belief has its own flaw.
11:00When you fight for a symbol or an abstract idea, you don't expect it to become real.
11:07Yet, in Soviet Russia, the entire system rested on a promise of utopia.
11:12The rulers always pushed its arrival just beyond the horizon.
11:1610 years away, 20, sometime in the 1980s.
11:22Four generations waited.
11:24The dream never came.
11:26And the army, like the state it served, began to rot from within.
11:32But fuel breaks even the strongest engine.
11:34The Soviet war machine ran on propaganda.
11:37And when that fuel no longer ignited anything inside the hearts of its soldiers, the gears ground to a halt.
11:45And no one could stop it because the system had become too big to question, too bloated to reform.
11:53It existed to serve itself.
11:56Countless bureaucrats depended on it.
11:59So it lumbered forward.
12:01Even as its foundations cracked.
12:05By the 1980s, the world saw the truth.
12:08The Soviet army couldn't even manage a decisive victory in Afghanistan.
12:13And in the First Chechen War, it didn't win.
12:17It bought the loyalty of the local elites to end the conflict.
12:21On paper, the Russian military still looked mighty.
12:25Parades were impressive.
12:28The weapons gleamed.
12:30The uniforms matched.
12:32But when faced with modern technology and modern idea of people management, it crumbled.
12:38And so the Russian government did what it always had when things got hard.
12:44It turned back to the oldest solution in the book.
12:47It hired mercenaries.
12:51Mercenaries in the Age of Superpowers
12:56During the Cold War, Soviet mercenaries never called themselves mercenaries.
13:00They were military advisors, dispatched by Moscow to places where ideology needed to be planted or protected.
13:08Both the United States and the USSR were locked in a race to gather allies, each trying to prove that
13:14their vision of the future was superior.
13:17For America, the main incentive was access to its vast markets.
13:22A lifeline for economies devastated by World War II.
13:25Many nations accepted, including former Soviet partners like China and Egypt.
13:31The Soviet Union couldn't promise prosperity.
13:34Instead, it offered something else.
13:37A ready-made ideology creates of weapons, decades of perfected repressive technology, and hard currency to prop up any regime
13:46willing to stand with Moscow.
13:48It didn't matter if the local leader was a warlord, a tyrant, or a thief.
13:54What mattered was whether he saluted the red flag on camera.
13:59If he did, Moscow delivered weapons, funding, and violence specialists.
14:04The Kremlin didn't worry about elections or public outreach when begging criminals.
14:10State-controlled media could turn any butcher into a hero of the revolution.
14:16To keep up in the global dominance game, the USSR sent advisors to Syria, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Cuba, Angola, Laos, and
14:25beyond.
14:26These specialists earned good money.
14:28At home, they were admired, tanned, worldly, envied.
14:34Foreign travel was a social upgrade in the grey monotony of the late Soviet years,
14:40and returning from an overseas posting carried prestige.
14:45But their missions were clogged in secrecy.
14:48Awards were handed out in back rooms.
14:51Their families stayed behind as leverage, a guarantee that no one would vanish abroad.
14:56In those years, Moscow built the networks and habits that would outlive the USSR.
15:03Local elites learned exactly whom to approach for military support,
15:08whether in exchange for mineral rights or a strategic port or reliable vote in the UN.
15:16The Wagner Group
15:20After the USSR collapsed, the wars came home.
15:25In Chechnya, the regular army faltered.
15:28A new term emerged – kontraktniki, or contract soldiers.
15:33The Soviet draft system was crumbling,
15:36so the government started offering contracts, cash, and bonuses to anyone willing to fight.
15:41These weren't always elite professionals.
15:45Many were desperate men with few choices.
15:48The difference between a mercenary and a soldier blurred.
15:53Years later, in Syria, that model reached full maturity.
15:57The Russian government sent official troops, yes, but also private fighters, mercenaries.
16:03Men hired through APAC networks, paid well above military wages,
16:08and sent to do that uninformed soldiers couldn't.
16:11If you are interested in how Russia operates in the Middle East,
16:16I have another video that dives deep into that story.
16:20Then came Africa.
16:21In country after country, Central African Republic, Sudan, Libya, Mali,
16:26the Wagner Group appeared.
16:28They protected residents, guarded gold mines, trained militias, or executed villagers.
16:37Sometimes they fought rebels.
16:40Sometimes they were the rebels.
16:42They didn't carry Russian flags, but their weapons came from Russian air bases.
16:47They didn't wear official uniforms, but their commanders coordinated directly with the Kremlin.
16:54Why use a group like Wagner?
16:56Because Russia needed deniable muscle.
16:59Fighters who could do the dirty work without officially staining the Kremlin's hands.
17:06And when things went wrong, Russia could shrug.
17:09They don't represent us.
17:12A perfect political tool, right?
17:14Wrong.
17:15Putin soon realized a dangerous truth.
17:18If armed men aren't part of the centralized war machine,
17:22If they aren't restrained by the thousand invisible frats that bind soldiers to the state,
17:29they become a frat.
17:31The perfect Russian soldier is one who feels isolated, disillusioned, and afraid to trust his fellow fighters.
17:40But Wagner fighters were the opposite.
17:43They trusted their commanders, and they had a shared identity.
17:47And when Prigozhin turned them around and marched toward Moscow,
17:52they revealed the one thing the Kremlin fears most.
17:56A loyal army that serves something other than the state.
18:00That's why Prigozhin was killed.
18:02That's why Wagner was dismantled.
18:04Its fighters were absorbed into the Russian army.
18:08Dispersed, diluted, and defanged.
18:11The mercenaries in Ukraine
18:16Technically, Russian law defines mercenary work as a criminal offense.
18:21But there is a loophole.
18:22If the state hires you, it's perfectly illegal.
18:26Today, recruiters come through Russia's poorest regions, prisons, and even psychiatric wards.
18:31They offer contracts to the sick, the addicted, and the desperate.
18:36These are not elite fighters.
18:39They are men with nothing left to lose.
18:41That makes them both expendable and easy to control.
18:45The Kremlin is trying to achieve two goals at once,
18:48keep fighters firmly under state control,
18:51while also getting highly motivated specialists in the art of killing.
18:55But it does not work that way,
18:58because it ignores personality types and male psychology.
19:02A true mercenary plays by his own rules.
19:06He never sees himself as a cog in the machine.
19:09He's a hunter, driven by victory and prizes,
19:13respecting only other hunters,
19:16not bureaucrats who have never wielded anything more dangerous than a dinner fork.
19:21That drive to win makes him creative, mobile, and dangerous.
19:27And often successful because others lack his ruthless, fearless, and violent nature.
19:34A mercenary is a perfect fit for small-scale, high-scale operations far from home.
19:41He gets paid, the client gets results, and the two may never even meet.
19:46But put that same man into a full-scale war fought in the traditional Russian style,
19:53mass slaughter for patches of territory.
19:55And he is miserable.
19:57To be effective, he needs a clear, achievable goal.
20:01He needs movement, action.
20:04When he's stuck with no clear way out, not even money will satisfy him.
20:09He craves victory and respect, at least in the eyes of his fellow mercenaries.
20:16And he certainly doesn't see himself as disposable cannon fodder.
20:20So, when these men end up in the trenches of the war in Ukraine,
20:26they often turn their game of dominance, not against the Ukrainians,
20:31but against other Russian soldiers.
20:33They bully them into submission, send them on their most dangerous assaults,
20:38and extort money from them.
20:41That's why mixing these hardened hunters with mercenaries scraped from villages and depressed towns,
20:47men with no military experience and no self-defense skills, was a disaster.
20:54The social dynamics inside the Russian army are rotten to the core.
20:59But the era of true mercenaries in Russia may not be over.
21:03Whispers from inside the country suggest that every governor and every oligarch
21:10is quietly building private forces.
21:13They are training and preparing because nobody knows what will happen next.
21:19Not with the economy collapsing, not with public anger rising,
21:24and not with a war that refuses to end.
21:27The White Ghosts
21:32If the stories about Russian mercenaries fascinate you,
21:35let me recommend my novel The White Ghosts Empire.
21:39After the Russian Civil War, tens of thousands of white army officers fled to China.
21:44In the eyes of colonial elites, they were losers.
21:48In the eyes of the Chinese, they were white devils.
21:53No money, no citizenship, no future.
21:56But then, anti-colonial strikes broke out across the country.
22:00Chinese workers refused to serve their European bosses.
22:04Warehouses and factories were paralyzed,
22:07and the only men willing and able to defend the colonial economy were the Russian mercenaries.
22:13Armed with experience and nothing to lose,
22:16they became the last line between collapse and order.
22:20If this video made you see Russia in a different light,
22:24help me share it with the world.
22:26Like this video, share it,
22:28leave me a comment.
22:29I read every one.
22:31Your thoughts make these conversations richer,
22:35and your support keeps them alive.
22:37If you want to take it a step further,
22:40you can join the channel,
22:42send a super thanks,
22:43or buy me a coffee.
22:45And if you do,
22:47your name will appear in the closing credits at the end of my videos,
22:51alongside others who help keep this work independent.
22:55And don't forget,
22:56I also have another YouTube channel,
22:58Elvira Bari,
22:59Forbidden Books.
23:00That's where I share my short stories and book excerpts,
23:03brought to life as short cinematic films.
23:06Link is in the description.
23:48Link is in the description.
Comments