The Drevlians, the most savage of the Tatar tribes, had been forced to pay him a large tribute, and were meditating upon their revenge.  They said:  “Let us kill the wolf or we will lose the flock.”  They watched their opportunity, seized him, tied him to two young trees bent forcibly together; then, letting them spring apart, the son of Rurik was torn to pieces.

No act of the wise regent Oleg was more fruitful in consequences than the choice of a wife for the young Igor.  Olga, who acted as regent during the minority of her son, was destined to be not only the heroine of the Epic Cycle in Russia, but the first apostle of Christianity in that heathen land; canonized by the Church, and remembered as “the first Russian who mounted to the Heavenly Kingdom.”

When the Drevlians sent gifts to appease her wrath at the murder of Igor, and offered her the hand of their prince, she had the messengers buried alive.  All she asked was three pigeons and three sparrows from every house in their capital town.  Lighted tow was tied to the tails of the birds, which were then permitted to fly back to their homes under the eaves of the thatched houses.  In the conflagration which followed, the inhabitants were massacred in a pleasing variety of ways; some strangled, some smothered in vapor, some buried alive, and those remaining reduced to slavery.

But an extraordinary transformation was at hand; and this vindictive heathen woman was going to be changed to an ardent convert to the Christian faith.  Nestor, who is the Russian Herodotus, relates that she went to Constantinople in 955, to inquire into the mysteries of the Christian Church.  The emperor was astonished, it is said, at the strength and adroitness of her mind.  She was baptized by the Greek Patriarch, under the new name of Helen, the emperor acting as her godfather.

There were already a few Christians in Kief, but so unpopular was the new religion that Olga’s son Sviatoslaf, upon reaching his majority, absolutely refused to make himself ridiculous by adopting his mother’s faith.  “My men will mock me,” was his reply to Olga’s entreaties, and Nestor adds “that he often became furious with her” for her importunity.

Sviatoslaf, the son of Igor and Olga, although the first prince to bear a Russian name, was the very type of the cunning, ambitious, and intrepid Northman, and his brief reign (964-972) displayed all these qualities.  He defeated the Khazarui, the most civilized of all those Oriental people, and once the most powerful.  He subjugated the Pechenegs, perhaps the most brutal and least civilized of all the barbarians.  But these were only incidental to his real purpose.