Russia, Vikings and Khazars

June 793 attack on Lindisfarne

In 862 A.D. Kievan Rus', the first united East Slavic state, was founded in 882. The state adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning with the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium.
 
In 882 a Viking leader, Oleg, moves his headquarters down the Dnieper, seizing the town of Kiev. Here, in 911, he negotiates a commercial treaty with the Byzantine empire. A Viking successor of Oleg's in Kiev, two generations later, describes how this first Russian city is the centre of a triangular trade between civilized Byzantium in the south, the steppe lands in the middle, and the wild forests of the north. Read more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazar_Correspondence
http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?ParagraphID=e...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars
The native religion of the Khazars is thought to have been Tengrism, like that of the North Caucasian Huns and other Turkic peoples.[18] The polyethnic populace of the Khazar Khaganate appears to have been a multiconfessional mosaic of pagan, Tengrist, Jewish, Christian and Muslim worshippers.[19] The ruling elite of the Khazars was said by Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Daud to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism in the 8th century,[20] but the scope of the conversion within the Khazar Khanate remains uncertain. Proposals of Khazar origins have been made regarding the Slavic Judaising Subbotniks, the Bukharan Jews, the Muslim Kumyks, Kazakhs, the Cossacks of the Don region, the Turkic-speaking Krymchaks and their Crimean neighbours the Karaites to the Moldavian Csángós, the Mountain Jews and others.[21][22][23]