Vladimir the Great

Before the conversion there was an attempt at the opposite. The Primary Chronicle records that on taking Kiev, Vladimir set up idols on the hill outside the palace: Perun the thunder god in wood with a silver head and a golden moustache, and beside him Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl and Mokosh, and that sacrifices were offered to them. Assembling several gods of different Slavic and Iranian derivations into one official group is a state project rather than an inherited cult, and it looks like an effort to give a young principality a single religious centre. The chronicle also records a killing under that regime, a Varangian Christian and his son taken by lot for sacrifice and refusing, whom it treats as the first martyrs of the Rus.

The dismantling was as public as the erection. After the baptism in 988 the idols were pulled down, some cut up and burned, and Perun was tied to a horse tail, dragged down to the Dnieper, beaten with sticks the whole way, and pushed into the water with men appointed to follow it downstream and push it off the banks until it passed the rapids. The chronicler is clear that this was staged to be watched. A god is unmade in public by the same authority that set it up.

The famous story is that Vladimir received missions and then sent envoys to see for himself. The Bulgars offered Islam and were refused because the Rus cannot do without drink; the Jews of Khazaria were asked where their homeland was and answered that God had scattered them; among the Germans the envoys saw no beauty; and in the great church at Constantinople they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth. It is a good story and it is a story. It was written down a century or so later by a chronicler with a case to make, and it explains a decision that had already been taken on other grounds.

The other grounds are visible enough. Vladimir sent troops to Basil II when the emperor needed them badly, took the emperor sister Anna in marriage, which was an extraordinary concession, and pressed the point by seizing Chersonesus in the Crimea. What came with the church mattered more than what came with the marriage. The liturgy arrived in Slavonic rather than Greek, because the Bulgarian mission had already translated it, so the Rus received a literary language along with a religion and did not have to learn another one to be Christian. The ecclesiastical link to Constantinople held for centuries, and Vladimir is a saint in both the Orthodox and the Catholic calendars, styled Equal to the Apostles.