We have but dim glimpses of the early religion of this people.  In the sixth century they are represented as regarding with awe the deity whom they designated as the creator of thunder.  The spectacle of the majestic storms which swept their plains and the lightning bolts hurled from an invisible hand, deeply impressed these untutored people.  They endeavored to appease the anger of the supreme being by the sacrifice of bulls and other animals.  They also peopled the groves, the fountains, the rivers with deities; statues were rudely chiseled, into which they supposed the spirits of their gods entered, and which they worshiped.  They deemed the supreme being himself too elevated for direct human adoration, and only ventured to approach him through gods of a secondary order.  They believed in a fallen spirit, a god of evil, who was the author of all the calamities which afflict the human race.

The polished Greeks chiseled their idols, from snow-white marble, into the most exquisite proportions of the human form.  Many they invested with all the charms of loveliness, and endowed them with the most amiable attributes.  The voluptuous Venus and the laurel-crowned Bacchus were their gods.  But the Sclavonians, regarding their deities only as possessors of power and objects of terror, carved their idols gigantic in stature, and hideous in aspect.

From these rude, scattered and discordant populations, the empire of Russia quite suddenly sprang into being.  Its birth was one of the most extraordinary events history has transmitted to us.  We have seen that the Normans, dwelling along the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic, and visiting the most distant coasts with their commercial and predatory fleets, had attained a degree of power, intelligence and culture, which gave them a decided preeminence over the tribes who were scattered over the wilds of central Russia.

A Sclavonian, whose name tradition says was Gostomysle, a man far superior to his countrymen in intelligence and sagacity, deploring the anarchy which reigned everywhere around him, and admiring the superior civilization of the Normans, persuaded several tribes unitedly to send an embassy to the Normans to solicit of them a king.  The embassy was accompanied by a strong force of these fierce warriors, who knew well how to fight, but who had become conscious that they did not know how to govern themselves.  Their message was laconic but explicit: 

“Our country,” said they, “is grand and fertile, but under the reign of disorder.  Come and govern us and reign over us.”

Three brothers, named Rurik, Sineous and Truvor, illustrious both by birth and achievements, consented to assume the sovereignty, each over a third part of the united applicants; each engaging to cooeperate with and uphold the others.  Escorted by the armed retinue which had come to receive them, they left their native shores, and entered the wilds of Scandinavia.  Rurik established himself at Novgorod, on lake Ilmen.  Sineous, advancing some three hundred miles further, north-east, took his station at Bielo Ozero, on the shores of lake Bielo.  Truvor went some hundred miles further south to Truvor, in the vicinity of Smolensk.