Saint Olga. Also called Helga (b. c. 890-d. 969, Kiev; feast day July 11), princess who was the first recorded female ruler in Russia and the first member of the ruling family of Kiev to adopt Christianity. She was canonized as the first Russian saint of the Orthodox Church.
Olga was the widow of Igor I, prince of Kiev, who was assassinated (945) by his subjects while attempting to extort excessive tribute. Because Igor's son Svyatoslav was still a minor, Olga became regent of the grand principality of Kiev from 945 to 964. She soon had Igor's murderers scalded to death and hundreds of their followers killed. Olga became the first of the princely Kievans to adopt Orthodox Christianity. She was probably baptized (c. 957), at Constantinople (now Istanbul), then the most powerful patriachate. Her efforts to bring Christianity to Russia were resisted by her son but continued by her grandson, the grand prince Vladimir (died 1015); together they mark the transition between pagan and Christian Russia. (The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., 1987. Chicago : Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 8, pg. 914).
St. Olga is venerated with her grandson St. Vladimir as the first-born of the new Christian people of Russia : the monk Jacob in the eleventh century grandiloquently refers to them as "the new Helen and the new Constantine, equals of the Apostles." Olga was before her conversion no less cruel and barbarous than Vladimir ; her husband, Prince Igor of Kiev, was assassinated, and she punished his murderers by scalding them to death with hot steam and treacherously slew hundreds of their followers.
Olga is popularly regarded as the first in Russia ever to be baptized. This is now seen to be far from the truth ; but it is still generally held that her baptism took place at Constantinople, about 957. Nevertheless she does in some measure represent the Germanic element in Russia's evangelization, for she about 959 sent a request for missionaries for "the land of Kiev" to the emperor Otto I, which resulted in the abortive mission of St. Adalbert of Magdeburg. Her efforts for the conversion of her own son, Svyatoslav, came to nothing : "My men would laugh at me if I took up with a strange religion", he declared feelingly. St. Olga died at an advanced age in 969. Her feast is observed by the Russians, Ukrainians, and others.
Among the scattered sources are Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De cerimoniis aulae byzantinae, ii, in PG, vol. cxii, and the chronicle of Cedrenus, p. 329 of vol. ii in the Bonn edition. See the bibliography of St. Vladimir, July 15. (Butler's lives of the saints. New York : P.J. Kennedy & Sons, 1956, pg. 72).