The first half of the volume provides what is still the best political history of medieval southern East Slavic territory in any language. It draws on an extraordinarily wide range of evidence to document events from the time of the death of Volodymyr the Great in 1015 through the period of Mongol devastations in 1237-41. Hrushevsky describes the consolidation of the Rus' state in the middle Dnipro region and its rapid political and cultural growth and increasing prosperity in East Slavic territory under the ever-expanding lines of Volodymyr's dynasty.

In the second half of the volume, Hrushevsky exploits all of the literary and archaeological evidence available at the turn of the twentieth century to describe as accurately as possible the physical presence of Rus' society on Ukrainian territory, including in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Pereiaslav lands, in Volhynia and Galicia, and in the steppe (what is now southern and eastern Ukraine). These two parts of the volume together make Hrushevsky's case that the Ukrainian people had in their past a period of political statehood lasting for almost four centuries and that by 1900, they and their ancestors had lived continuously in the same territory for almost 1,500 years. Thus, Hrushevsky declares in his introductory remarks, "The history of the territory of present-day Ukraine is the history of the Ukrainian people."