Sviatoslav I (c. 945–972), the last pagan ruler of Kievan Rus', destroyed Khazaria and fought Byzantium for the Balkans — a whirlwind of campaigns ended by a Pecheneg ambush at the Dnieper rapids.
Sviatoslav is the Primary Chronicle's pagan hero: the prince who "sent word to the nations, saying, I am coming upon you". In a decade of continuous war he shattered Khazaria — sacking Sarkel (965) and the capital Itil, ending the khaganate that had taxed the steppe for three centuries — and subdued the Volga Bulgars and Vyatichi.
Invited by Byzantine gold to raid Bulgaria, he decided to keep it, announcing he would move his capital to the Danube. The emperor John Tzimiskes needed two bloody years (971) to besiege him out of Dorostolon; the withdrawal treaty fed him to the Pechenegs at the Dnieper rapids the following spring. He refused baptism to the end — his warriors, he told his Christian mother, would laugh.
The Primary Chronicle — a twelfth-century compilation, and the caution applies to everything that follows — makes Sviatoslav a small child at his father Igor's death in 945, and gives him a ceremonial début at his mother Olga's Derevlian revenge-battle: the boy's thrown spear, falling short, opening the fight. Olga ruled as regent through his minority.
His name is the first purely Slavic one in the ruling line — after the Norse Rurik, Oleg (Helgi), Igor (Ingvar), and Olga (Helga) — a detail historians read as the dynasty's assimilation in progress even as its prince kept the old gods.
Uniquely for an early Rus' ruler, we have an eyewitness portrait from the enemy: Leo the Deacon saw him at the Danube parley of 971 — medium height, powerful, blue-eyed, bushy-browed, head shaved but for a single lock, a gold earring with two pearls and a ruby, clothes white and indistinguishable from his men's except cleaner, rowing his own oar. The Byzantine historian's Achilles-comparison was deliberate.
The chronicle's character-sketch matches: no baggage, no cauldron, meat roasted on coals, sleeping on his saddle-blanket under the stars, and the herald's warning sent ahead to every enemy. How much is literary shaping — the pagan warrior-king as foil for his sainted mother and converting son — is fair to ask; but with a Greek eyewitness corroborating the austerity and the charisma, Sviatoslav survives source-criticism better than most figures of his century.
The eastern war (963–966 by the chronicle's reckoning) redrew western Eurasia: the Vyatichi detached from Khazar tribute, Sarkel on the Don stormed in 965, Itil on the Volga left — a later Arab geographer reported — without a grape or a leaf; the khaganate that had balanced the steppe for centuries simply ceased. The vacuum let the Pechenegs — his eventual killers — roam free: destroying Khazaria was magnificent and, for Kiev's long-term safety, arguably ruinous.
The Balkan adventure began as a Byzantine subcontract (967/968): raid Bulgaria, paid in gold. Sviatoslav took eighty towns and decided the Danube — "the centre of my lands, where all riches flow" — suited him better than Kiev, which he left to his sons after beating off the Pechenegs' 968 siege of his mother's city. Byzantium, having invited the wolf, spent 970–971 expelling him: Arcadiopolis checked his coalition, Tzimiskes stormed Preslav at Easter 971, and after the three-month blood-bath of Dorostolon — sorties, night burials with prisoner sacrifices, the last great battle fought, the Greeks admitted, to a hair's breadth — Sviatoslav treated: Bulgaria abandoned, trade rights renewed, safe passage home.
The safe passage was the trap: warned — by Byzantine embassy to the Pechenegs, the chronicle alleges — the khan Kurya waited at the Dnieper rapids where every boat must portage. Sviatoslav, refusing the detour his voivode Sveneld took overland, wintered on the river and died at the rapids in spring 972. The gold-lined skull-cup the chronicle gives Kurya is a steppe-literary flourish as old as Herodotus; the ambush and the death are as solid as anything in the period.
His partition of Rus' among three sons — Yaropolk, Oleg, Vladimir — delivered the fratricidal war from which Vladimir the Great emerged; the pagan hero's youngest son would make Rus' Christian within a generation, completing the arc his grandmother had begun. In the modern era the chronicle's Sviatoslav — the ascetic, the herald's warning, the death at the rapids — became a foundational warrior-image in both Ukrainian and Russian national imaginations, contested like everything in that shared inheritance.