On July 28, Russia celebrates the Day of the Baptism of Rus - a memorial date established in honor of "an important historical event that significantly influenced the social, spiritual and cultural development of the peoples of Russia and the strengthening of Russian statehood."
Ancient Russian sources show no consensus regarding the circumstances and timing of Prince Vladimir's baptism. According to the "Korsun Legend" - a tradition that became part of ancient Russian chronicles at the turn of the 11th-12th centuries and later the Life of St. Vladimir - the prince was baptized in 988 in the Crimean settlement of Korsun (now part of Sevastopol).
The baptism of the prince and the Old Russian state is presented in sources within a complex international context, primarily in connection with the close military-political alliance with Byzantium. The chronicle tale about Prince Vladimir's "testing of faiths" tells of embassies from Muslims of Volga Bulgaria, Judaized Khazars, and Byzantium, all persuading the prince to adopt their faith. Vladimir sent his own embassies "to the Bulgars," "to the Germans," and "to the Greeks" to "test their worship." After the embassies returned, he chose Byzantine Christianity, which impressed the envoys with the beauty of its worship service.
"Let us remember that the testing of faiths was not about which faith was more beautiful, but about which faith was true. And the main argument for the truth of the faith, the Russian envoys declared, was its beauty. This is no accident! Precisely because of this idea of the primacy of the artistic principle in church and state life, the first Russian Christian princes so diligently built up their cities, building central churches in them," noted Academician D.S. Likhachev.
The term "Baptism of Rus" also denotes the lengthy process of gradual integration of Christianity into the Old Russian state in the 9th-10th centuries and the Christianization of the population, which lasted for decades, and in some regions - for centuries after Prince Vladimir's baptism.
"If the circle of beliefs associated with the higher pagan pantheon was immediately discarded, the Church could not abolish the lower level of folk-religious pagan consciousness. It only gradually introduced Christian ideas into it, sometimes interpreting the new faith through images of the old. This happened, in particular, with the pre-Christian cult of 'Mother Earth - the nourisher,' which later became one of the most important semantic categories of the Russian idea," writes historian A.V. Loginov.
The Baptism of Rus appears as Prince Vladimir's deliberate choice, conditioned by religious quests and a complex of domestic and foreign policy reasons. The Baptism of Rus became the prerequisite for the emergence of state-ideological and cultural unity of the Old Russian state.