The Early East Slavs splintered along preexisting tribal lines into a number of independent and competing principalities.

The Varangians or Varyags was the name given by Greeks and East Slavs to Vikings.

Proponents of the Norman theory embrace the earliest written source for the East Slavs, the Russian Primary Chronicle, an account produced much later, in the 12th century.

The Slavs brought Christianity, and a part of local people took Christianity and gradually became East Slavs; the remainder of Mari people migrated to the west far inland.

Indeed, Galician Russophiles wrote that one of the reasons for all East Slavs to adopt the Russian language was that the modern Russian language had been created in the 17th and 18th centuries by scholars from Ukraine.

Old East Slavic or Old Russian was a language used in the 10th-15th centuries by East Slavs in the Kievan Rus' and states which evolved after the collapse of the Kievan Rus'.

It is probable that the Eastern Galindians, as the bearers of the Moshchiny culture, also occupied all the Kaluga Oblast before the Early East Slavs peopled the Moshchiny culture's area at the turn of 7th and 8th centuries.

In Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, the bublik is essentially a much larger bagel, but have a wider hole, and are drier and chewier Other ring-shaped breads known among East Slavs are baranki (smaller and drier) and sushki (even smaller and drier).