Russians are Vikings, too

DelanceyPlace.com has an excerpt from Red Fortress by Catherine Merridale:

What we now know as Russia began when bands of Viking traders known as the Rhos or Rus came to Kiev circa 800 CE and started to intermarry with Slavs. Many soon moved on to the city of Moscow. These Vikings were regarded as such barbarians that they were banned at first from entering the city of Constantinople, which was, at that time, the dominant influence in the region. However, they were dazzled by Constantinople and ultimately abandoned their paganism to adopt Constantinople's version of Christianity. Of course, Kiev is now the capital of the Ukraine, and currently the scene of deadly riots rooted in a dispute over the competing influence of the Russians versus the European Union in that country. This conflict is partly rooted in ethnic differences within the Ukraine:

The area where we find modern day Russia and the Ukraine seemed to be a dangerous, exotic place, where fortunes waited for adventurers. Human slaves were one source of profit for, while Muslims and Christians were forbidden to enslave each other, the pagan Slavs were fair game. The appetite for fur, meanwhile, seemed to be inexhaustible, and it was purchased by everyone from the Arabs and Turks of Asia to the Franks and Anglo-Saxons of Europe's Atlantic fringe. If the goods could be brought to market, in Constantinople, maybe, or Bolghar, the great city on the Volga route towards the east, serious money, silver, was on hand to pay for them.
The profits on offer, and the many opportunities to set up customs posts and levy taxes on the precious freight, meant that the trade routes were worth fortunes, but the local Slavs were neither organized nor swift enough to take control of them. Instead, the prize fell to some bands of Vikings from Scandinavia, soon known to Greeks and Arabs as Rhos. This used to be another controversial issue (Russian nationalists resented the suggestion that their founding princes might have come from somewhere else), but the archaeological evidence around the Baltic is conclusive. They were ambitious, warlike, and incorrigibly mobile. In 860 AD, they even managed to attack Constantinople, the heir of Rome, by closing on the great walled city from the sea. Before long, they had wrested the Dnieper capital of Kiev from the people known as the Khazars and mounted a succession of campaigns against Slav settlements as far east as the middle Volga.

These Vikings, referred to now by most historians as the Rus, were not above consorting with the region's older tribes. Over time the Rus and native Slavs began to merge and even intermarry, sharing a landscape and its local gods and inventing new stories, in a common language, to make sense of their world. They were not yet a single people, but the foundations of a culture had certainly been laid.
It was always crucial for the warlike Rus to persuade their various neighbors to trade with them. Unfortunately, the wealthiest of these, the citizens of Constantinople, were horrified by stories of the Vikings to the north. The very harshness of their world, to say nothing of that recent sea-attack, made this particular group of pagans seem especially uncouth. Although Constantinople's imperial government hired Vikings of its own to serve as mercenaries, undomesticated ones, whatever they called themselves, were regarded as barbarians, and at first the Rus were not permitted to enter the imperial capital at all. Instead, they had to trade through the Black Sea ports of Cherson and Tmutorokan, which meant sharing their profits with a swarm of middle-men. They finally secured a trade treaty with Constantinople in 911 AD, but its terms made clear that Rus merchants were permitted to enter the city only if they kept to their own designated gate. They were also forbidden to arrive in groups of more than fifty at a time.
The turning point came in the late tenth century. Dazzled by Constantinople's gold and fascinated by its power, the pagan Rus adopted the Christianity of the patriarchs. It was a choice, and there were other options, not least the chance of allegiance to Rome. At the time, the gulf at lay between the two main Christian churches was not deep, but the Rus' decision to align themselves with Constantinople's version of the faith would shape their people's future for centuries. The cultural impact was incalculable. It was the splendour and the beauty of eastern monotheism, apparently, that captivated Russia's Norsemen. After a visit to Constantinople's magnificent Church of the Holy Wisdom, a party of Rus emissaries was struck with awe. The building was a miracle, the liturgy spectacular. 'We knew not', one of them reported to his prince, Vladimir of Kiev, 'whether we were in heaven or on earth.' Around 988 AD (no date can be entirely fixed), Prince Vladimir accepted baptism for himself, and extended the same boon to his subjects by ordering their mass immersion in the Dnieper. Just to make sure, he also had the pagan idols flogged and dragged about the streets before condemning them to death."

Rico says one should always have the idols flogged...