When did Russia start using Cyrillic?

Around the time of Christianisation, I think they asked Byzantine scholars to write a bible, as they had no written language.
 
Im not sure Cyrillic WAS invented, so much as grew.

Look at mediæval texts - Cyrillic and Greek are almost the same. I think they just started writing Slavic languages in Greek, dissimilating beta from veta, throwing in Shin from Hebrew for the 'sh' sound, and running from there.

Once you've done that, you need hard and soft signs, then combine a i with a and o to get Ya and Yu, and youre pretty much there....
 
Russia wrote in Galgolithic alongside Cyrillic, and according to some very scant evidence beloved by various nationalists, Slavic peoples used a sort of Runic system like the Turcic and Germanic peoples around them before modern scripts. No examples survive, though.

Earliest Cyrillic documents are from the 11th c. but there's no reason to suppose it wasn't used from the get-go.
 
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