Which Viking-founded Russian dynasty ruled until 1598?

The Rurikids, traced to Rurik, a Varangian - a Scandinavian - who according to the chronicles was invited in around 862 to rule Novgorod because the locals could not stop fighting each other. The dynasty then ran Kyiv, and later Moscow, for over seven hundred years.

The Norse origin has been politically explosive for three centuries. The Normanist argument - that a Scandinavian elite founded the Russian state - was promoted by German scholars in the eighteenth century, furiously rejected by Lomonosov, banned outright in the Stalin period as an insult to Slavic self-sufficiency, and remains touchy. The linguistic and archaeological evidence for Scandinavians in the trade towns is strong; what a founding invitation in a chronicle written 250 years later actually records is another matter.

The line ended in 1598 with Feodor I, the mentally limited son of Ivan the Terrible, whose younger brother had died in disputed circumstances as a child. What followed was the Time of Troubles: famine that killed perhaps a third of the population, a series of impostors each claiming to be that dead brother, Polish occupation of Moscow, and finally the election of the first Romanov in 1613.