Brief history of Russia (Part 1)

Culturally, Kiev served as the agent of transmission for Byzantine civilization--Orthodox Christianity and its art (music, architecture, and mosaics); it also developed, however, into the creative center of a high-level indigenous culture represented, in literature, by the sermons of Hilarion (d. after 1055) and Vladimir Monomakh (d. 1125); in historiography, by the early-12th-century Primary Chronicle; in law, by Yaroslav's codification, Pravda; and in monastic life, by Kiev's 11th-century cave monastery (Lavra). This culture served as the common foundation for the later Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Great Russian civilizations.

The decline of Kievan Rus' (starting in the late 11th century) was brought about by internecine feuds, by a change in Byzantine trade patterns--which made the old river route obsolete--and by the depopulation resulting from slaughter by nomadic invaders from the east. The end, however, came swiftly when the MONGOLS, surging forth from Central Asia, overran the South Russian plain. Kiev was sacked in 1240, and the Mongol khans of the GOLDEN HORDE at Sarai on the Volga established their control over most of European Russia for about two centuries.

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