The Baptism of Rus (988)

Vladimir was the pagan grand prince of Kyiv, the chief city of Rus' — the realm of Slavic and Scandinavian peoples strung along the rivers of Eastern Europe. His grandmother, the princess Olga, had already become a Christian, but the land was still pagan. The Russian Primary Chronicle, our main source, tells how Vladimir sent envoys to examine the faiths of his neighbors: the Islam of the Volga Bulgars, the Judaism of the Khazars, the Christianity of the Latin West, and the Orthodoxy of the Greeks.

In Constantinople the envoys were taken to the Divine Liturgy in Hagia Sophia, and they came home unable to describe what they had seen except to say that God dwells there among men — the story is told more fully in the entry on the Divine Liturgy. Historians note that the chronicle shapes the tale to a familiar literary pattern of the wise ruler testing the religions; but as the tradition tells it, Rus' was won less by argument than by the beauty of worship.

Vladimir was baptized — by tradition at Cherson in the Crimea — and married Anna, sister of the Byzantine emperor. Returning to Kyiv, he ordered the old idols cast down and dragged through the streets, and summoned the people to the River Dnieper to be baptized. The Chronicle records his prayer over them: "O God, who hast created heaven and earth, look down… on this thy new people, and grant them, O Lord, to know thee as the true God, even as the other Christian nations have known thee."

The traditional year is 988. Clergy, books, and craftsmen came from Byzantium, and because Slavonic worship already existed thanks to Cyril and Methodius, the new Christians could pray from the first in a language they understood (see Church Slavonic). Churches rose, a metropolitan see was established at Kyiv under the Patriarch of Constantinople, and monastic life soon took root.

With its baptism Rus' entered the wider world of Orthodox civilization: the faith, the Slavonic liturgy, Byzantine iconography, chant, and law all arrived together. Vladimir and Olga are honored as "Equals to the Apostles," and Vladimir's sons Boris and Gleb, killed without resistance in a struggle for power, became the first native saints — passion-bearers who chose not to shed their brothers' blood.

It is worth saying plainly what this event is and is not. From the single root of the baptism of Rus' grew the Orthodox Churches of the eastern Slavs; the Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian faithful alike trace their Christianity to Kyiv in 988. That shared beginning belongs to all of them together, and it should not be pressed into the service of any later national claim. What the tradition remembers is simpler and deeper: a whole people brought to the waters of baptism, and a new Christian world beginning on the banks of the Dnieper.