The Slavic ones (Xe - XIIe century)
Multi-media chart Hatchet
The first official structure
until 980, the State kiévien, torn inside by the fratricidal fights that the complexity of the successional mode supports, remains under the threat of the Poles, the Scandinavians and the nomads of the steppes.
Then, under the reigns of large-princes Vladimir I (980-1015) and Iaroslav the Wise one (1019-1054), the country knows a true cultural and political apogee. The decline of Kiev starts at the end of the XI E century, and will succeed, in second half of the XII E century, with the parcelling out of the State in independent principalities.
The princes of Kiev, whose origin of the power is soldier, are surrounded comrades in arms, the boyards, which they liberally equip with fields in reward of their services. This powerful land aristocracy - they train near prince Conseil of the boyards - saw work of the peasants, whose great mass remains however free.
The network of the cities (large boroughs, organized around a central fortress out of wooden, the kreml, or the Kremlin), rather dense, knows a polymorphic economic activity. The most important cities, Novgorod, Pskov and Kiev, primarily practice exchanges with Byzance (with which commercial treaties are signed into 907,911,945 and 971) along an axis commonly called the “road of Varègues to the Greeks”.
The conversion of the Slavic ones
The conversion of Slavic of the East to Christianity is undoubtedly the essential fact of this period. In 989, large-prince Vladimir imposes the “baptism of Russia” (according to certain sources worthy of faith, like the Chronicle, one found Christians among the Russians, and even a Christian church in Kiev well before this date), by which it gives to his people a national religion, which will become an instrument of political unification and a factor of cultural development: holy books copied in slavon thanks to the alphabet developped at the point by the bishops Cyrille and Method (Cyrillic alphabet); installation of an ecclesiastical hierarchy formed in Constantinople; construction, to the XII E and XIII E centuries, of stone churches on the Byzantine model (Holy-Sophie of Kiev, Holy-Sophie de Novgorod, Saint-Saver of Vladimir).
Lastly, thanks to Christianity, the State of Kiev enters within the space of European diplomatic relations (the girl of prince Iaroslav, Anna, marries Henri I er, king de France, in 1040). It will be necessary several centuries however before the whole of the population is not christianized, and one of the features more striking Russian culture will be, until the contemporary time, the maintenance of pagan traditions inside Christianity, in dvoeverié Russian (double faith).