In full Vladimir Svyatoslavich, by name St. Vladimir or Vladimir The Great, Russian Svyatoy Vladimir, or Vladimir Veliky (b. c. 956, Kiev, Kievan Rus (now in Ukraine); d. July 15, 1015, Berestova, near Kiev; feast day July 15), grand prince of Kiev and first Christian ruler in Kievan Rus, whose military conquests consolidated the provinces of Kiev and Novgorod into a single state, and whose Byzantine baptism determined the course of Christianity in the region.
Son of the Norman-Rus prince Svyatoslav of Kiev by one of his courtesans, in the Rurik lineage dominant from the 10th to the 13th centuries, Vladimir was made prince of Novgorod in 970. On the death of his father in 972, he was forced fo flee to Scandinavia, where he enlisted help from an uncle and overcame Yaropolk, another son of Svyatoslav, who attempted to seize the duchy of Novgorod as well as Kiev. By 980 Vladimir had consolidated the Kievan realm from the Ukraine to the Baltic Sea and had solidified the frontiers against incursions of Bulgarian, Baltic, and Eastern nomads.
Although Christianity in Kiev existed before Vladimir's time, he had remained a pagan, accumulated about seven wives, established temples, and, it is said, taken part in idolatrous rites involving human sacrifice. With insurrections troubling Byzantium, the emperor Basil II (976-1025) sought military aid from Vladimir, who agreed, in exchange for Basil's sister Anne in marriage. A pact was reached about 987, when Vladimir also consented to the condition that he become a Christian. Having undergone baptism, assuming the Christian patronal name Basil, he stormed the Byzantine area of Chersonesus (Korsun, now part of Sevastopol) to eliminate Constantinpole's final reluctance. Vladimir then ordered the Christian conversion of Kiev and Novgorod, where idols were cast into the Dnepr River after local resistance had been suppressed. The new Rus Christian worship adopted the Byzantine rite in the Old Church Slavonc language. The story (deriving from the 11th century monk Jacob) that Vladimir chose the Byzantine rite over the liturgies of German Christendom, Judaism, and Islam because of its transcendent beauty is apparently mythically symbolic of his determination to remain independent of external political control, particularly of the Germans. The Byzantines, however, maintained ecclesiastical control over the new Rus church, appointing a Greek metropolitan, or archbishop, for Kiev, who functioned both as legate of the patriarch of Constantinople and of the emperor. The Rus-Byzantine religiopolitical integration checked the influence of the Roman Latin church in the Slavic East and determined the course of Russian Christianity, although Kiev exchanged legates with the papacy. Among the churches erected by Vladimir was the Desyatinnaya in Kiev (designed by Byzantine architects and dedicated about 996) that became the symbol of Rus conversion. The expansion of education, judicial institutions, and aid to the poor were other legacies of the Christian Vladimir.
Another marriage, following the death of Anne (1011), affiliated Vladimir with the Holy Roman emperors of the German Ottonian dynasty and produced a daughter, who became the consort of Casimir I the Restorer of Poland (1016-58). Vladimir's memory was kept alive by innumerable folk ballads and legends (The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., Chicago : Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1992, vol. 12, pg. 411-412).
The earliest saints of Russia, princes and monks, were connected with Kiev in the south-west, "the God-protected mother of Russian cities", now the capital of what we call The Ukraine and in those days centre of a principality whose Finnish-Slav people were ruled by princes of Scandinavian origin, Varangians, who as pirates and traders had penetrated into Russia by its waterways. During the last quarter of the tenth century the grand-prince of Kiev was Vladimir, a man not only reared in idolatry but one who freely indulged in the barbarous excesses that were available to one in his position : he was brutal and bloodthirsty, and a contemporary Arabian chronicler, ibn-Foslan, comments on his five wives and numerous female slaves, which supports the statement of the Chronicle of Nestor that Vladimir's "desire for women was too much for him." The circumstances of this prince's conversion to Christianity have been and still are much debated, but converted he was, probably in the year 989, when he was about thirty-two; and he then received in marriage Anne, daughter of the emperor Basil II at Constantinpole : the two events were closely connected. And the conversion of the Russian people is dated from then.
The fact that pious writers have attributed perfect purity of motive to Vladimir, when undoubtedly he was moved in great measure by the prospect of political and economic advantages from an alliance with the Byzantines and the Christian Church, must not be allowed to obscure that, once having accepted Christianity, he is said to have been wholehearted in his adherence to it. He put away his former wives and mistresses and amended his life; he had idols publicly thrown down and destroyed; and he supported the Greek missionaries with energy and enthusiasm. Indeed, with an excess of energy, for at times he did not stop short of "conversion" by force : to refuse baptism was to incur penalties. But quite apart from that sort of thing, the speed with which the Russians became Christian has been much exaggerated, and during the reign of Vladimir the new religion probably did not penetrate far beyond the Kievan nobility and wealthy merchants. Nor was its subsequent spreading so fast as has been represented : paganism gave ground but slowly. Nevertheless he was revered in after years not only because he was a sinner who repented but because he brought about the reconciliation of the Russian people with God. He was the Apostle of Russia, chosen from on high for that end.
"The Devil was overcome by fools and madmen" says the Chronicle of Nestor, and empasizes that St. Vladimir received God's grace and forgiveness, while "many righteous and godly men strayed from the path of uprightness and perished." And it would seem that his repentance and understanding of his new obligations were of the simple, straightforward kind which will forever remain at the heart of the most developed and complex Christianity: "When he had in a moment of passion fallen into sin he at once sought to make up for it by penitence and almsgiving" says a chronicler. It is said that he even had scruples whether, now that he was a Christian, he was entitled to punish robbers and even murderers by putting them to death. Such ideas astonished the sophisticated Greek ecclesiastics, whe appealed to examples in the Old Testament and Roman history to show that punishment of the wicked was the duty of a Christian prince. But Vladimir seems to have been only half convinced.
The circumstances of Vladimir's conversion brought his people within the Byzantine patriarchate, but he was not a particularist. He exchanged ambassadors with the apostolic court of Rome; he helped the German bishop St. Boniface (Bruno) of Querfurt in his mission to the Pechenegs; and he even borrowed certain canonical features from the West, notably the institution of tithes, which were unknown to Byzantines. Not till the Mongol invasions was Christian Russia cut off from the West.
St. Vladimir died in 1015, after, as is said, giving away all his personal belongings to his friends and to the poor. His feast is solemly celebrated by the Russians, Ukrainians and others.
The original Russian sources are indicated in some detail in the bibliography of vol. iv of the "Cambridge Medieval History", pp. 819-821. The Chronicle of Nestor has been translated by S.H. Cross, "The Russian primary chronicle" (1930). See N. Baumgarten, : Orientalia Christiana", vol. xxiv, no. i, 1931 ("Olaf Tryggwison...") and vol. xxvii. no. i, 1932 ("St. Vladimir..."); G. Fedotov, "Le bapteme de St. Vladimir..." in "Irenikon", t. xv (1938), p. 417 seq. ; M. Jugie, "Les origines romaines de l'Eglise russe" in "Echos d'Orient", no. 187 (1937). Summaries in Fliche and Martin "Historie de l'Eglise", vol. vii, p. 444-451, and DTC., s.v. Russie. For Christians before Vladimir, see also M. de Taube, "Rome et la Russie...", vol. i (1947). And see F. Dvornik, "The making of Central and Eastern Europe (1949), p. 170 seq. (Butler's lives of the saints. NY : P.J. Kennedy & Sons, 1956, pg. 110-111).