Welcome to an overdrive episode of the Russian rulers history podcast.

Well you might be saying, wait a minute, weren't we supposed to have a regular episode come up?

And yes, the answer is you were supposed to have one. But between

my brother-in-law getting married and my youngest daughter having her 10th birthday, along

with nine crazy little girls staying at our house overnight

this past weekend and the fact that I was a little unhappy with parts of my script and

then I came upon some material that seemed to contradict some of the information that I had gathered about people like

Leonette Breshnev and Alexi Kasegan and Nikolai Padgorni, I decided to postpone that to make sure that my data was correct and that we were going to be able to give you a truthful honest

Podcast, which will come this weekend because my slate is clear and I'll be able to record it.

Now I want to kind of go back in time.

Our last overdrive was the ending of Khrushchev,

but I want to go back, way back, to kind of the beginnings of Russia. And this is going to be a series that I'm going to be doing.

And this comes from a book called Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales.

It was edited by Sergei Xenofsky.

I'm really happy with this one.

It's an older book, back from the 70s,

and I was able to find this,

and it has a lot of great literature readings that I'm going to be doing over time because I want to get more of a richness of Russian history that it's not just the rulers, it was the people who founded the country,

those of the legends, like the founding of Kiev, which we'll be talking about.

And we'll be going back to people like Rurik and Oleg.

But the tales that are told and how the Russian people were told about these great people

and these legends is something I'd really like to share with you starting with today's episode.

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