BEFORE CHRISTIANITY: RELIGION AND POWER

It is difficult to reconstruct from extant sources the concatenation of peoples, routes and hazards which gave rise to the earliest political formations in the land of Rus'. Yet some consideration – however speculative – is important in understanding the processes of ‘state formation’ and the significance of the adoption of Christianity by a leader who, having fought his way to paramountcy, felt the need to dignify, legitimize and define his regime. Two centuries before Vladimir's reign (c. 978–1015), the region appears to have lacked an overarching political authority or any associations with a former occupying power, such as Rome. Nor is there any indication that the indigenous peoples had generated intricate or finely meshed forms of governance for themselves.

The ‘aboriginal inhabitants’ of the ninth century were described in the Rus' Primary Chronicle over 200 years later, but lack of written or physical evidence makes working out where these groupings were based, and to what extent they were organized into clear-cut tribes or clans, problematic. In the northern region lived a scattering of Finnic-speaking peoples, with intermingled groupings of Balts and Slavs further south, stretching westwards to the Baltic, eastwards beyond the Upper Dnieper region and north as far as Lake Ilmen. Lakes such as Ilmen, Pskov, Ladoga and Beloe Ozero acted as communication hubs, since their fertile soil and surrounding resources could sustain sizable numbers of hunters, fishermen and farmers, and these population concentrations could trade along the riverways leading from the lakes.