On a hill above the Dnieper stood Perun — god of thunder and of the war-band, carved of wood, with a silver head and a golden moustache. Men brought him sacrifices and swore on the sword before him. He was more than an idol — he was the graven image of a whole way of life: the rule of force, loyalty to kin, the law of blood and of luck in battle. Only a few years before the baptism Vladimir himself, on taking power, had gathered these gods onto the Kievan hill and raised them as the standard of his reign. The idol of force was no stranger's invention but the very heart of the world in which the prince had grown up and conquered. Which is why the break had to begin with him.
In 988 Vladimir deliberately broke what he himself had lately exalted. At his order Perun was lashed to a horse's tail, dragged down from the hill, beaten with staves "to the shaming of the demon," and cast into the river; the other idols were hewn apart and burned. Then the people of Kiev were led down to the Dnieper and baptized. This was no gentle growth of a new faith alongside the old — it was a public rupture, the renunciation by prince and city of the old pledge of their strength. The god they had sworn by only yesterday floated downstream before the eyes of those who had worshipped him.
But an idol does not depart on command as quickly as its statue falls. There followed the long era historians would call double belief: the old gods did not vanish; they changed clothes. Perun the thunderer dissolved into the figure of the prophet Elijah on his chariot of fire; wood-spirits, house-spirits, and water-nymphs lived on beside the new saints; the rites of soil and harvest grew into the church calendar. The baptism of Kiev in a single day did not become the baptism of the heart in a single century — faith sank in slowly, through resistance, habit, and fear, and this hidden captivity to the old lasted for generations.
And yet the turn was real. Rus entered the circle of Christian nations — and the faith brought its dowry: letters, the book, stone architecture, law, the very sense of a great history into which this people was now written. It was the same Slavic turning others had made before her: the baptism of Bulgaria, the work of Cyril and Methodius, who had given the Slavs an alphabet for the Word. The idol of tribal force was cast down — and in its place grew not a void but a language in which, for the first time, a people could tell its own story.