Slavic Peoples

Slavic Peoples, most numerous of European peoples, with a population of more than 250 million, distributed principally in Eastern and Central Europe, most in the Balkan Peninsula, and beyond the Ural Mountains in Asia. The Slavic language group, with its many dialects, is part of the Indo-European language family. Linguistically, the group can be divided into: the East Slavic branch, consisting of Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian; the West Slavic branch, including Polish, Czech, and Slovak; and the South Slavic branch, including Slovenian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian.

The early Slavs were farmers and herders living in the marshes and woodlands of what is now eastern Poland and western Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. From about ad 150 the Slavic peoples began to expand in all directions. To the north they followed the rivers through the forests of Russia, occupying territory populated by Finnish and Baltic peoples, many of whom they absorbed. To the west they encountered Germanic and Celtic groups as they occupied much of Central Europe. By the 7th century the Slavs had reached as far south as the Adriatic and Aegean seas. During the next two centuries they settled in most of the Balkan Peninsula, then part of the Byzantine Empire, dislocating indigenous populations or slavicizing newcomers, such as the Bulgarians. To the east, by the end of the 16th century, the Russians had already secured a permanent foothold beyond the Ural Mountains in Asia, and, by the 19th century, Slavic culture had reached the Pacific Ocean.

Whereas the ancient Slavs probably exhibited considerable racial and cultural homogeneity, the modern Slavic peoples are united mainly by their linguistic affinity and a sense of common origins. Extensive contact with a variety of peoples has profoundly influenced the racial and cultural development of the Slavs. Today, the Slavic groups show a far greater range of diversity in both physical type and culture than is shown by any other Europeans.

Christianity was initially introduced to the Slavs by Greek missionaries during the 9th and 10th centuries. Their religious development, however, was altered by the separation of the Eastern and Western Churches in 1054. The Slavs quickly became the focus of intense rivalry between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Catholicism and Western culture triumphed among the Poles, Slovaks, and Czechs; later, however, the Czechs were significantly affected by the Reformation, and, because of this, they are today the only Slavic people with a large Protestant minority. In the Balkans, the Slovenes and Croats also gave their allegiance to Roman Catholicism and fell into the sphere of Central European civilization. The Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians, and a majority of the Eastern Slavs (Belorussians, Russians, Ukrainians) joined the Orthodox Church, adopting many aspects of Byzantine culture, including an adaptation of the Greek alphabet, which forms what is known as the Cyrillic alphabet.

During the 14th century the Ottoman Turks conquered much of south-eastern Europe; parts of what are now Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia remained under Ottoman rule until 1912. Centuries of Turkish domination had a profound effect on the Balkan Slavs, many of whom were forced to convert to Islam. Today the majority of Slavic Muslims are in Bosnia and southern Bulgaria.

Although the Slavs created a number of medieval kingdoms between the 9th and 11th centuries, much of their subsequent history was characterized by subjugation within foreign states. The present Slavic nations are, to a great extent, the result of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires following World War I. With the exception of the Czechs, the Slavs remained a predominantly agrarian people until the mid-20th century. After World War II most of the Slavic nations came under the Soviet sphere of influence, and their Marxist governments embarked on ambitious programmes of industrialization and urbanization. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the various East European nations moved towards setting up independent democratic governments. In some areas, particularly the former Yugoslavia, this transition ignited conflict among Slavs of different national and religious groups.