The Russian language was shaped by several major influences. These included the 9th-century Christian missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius, who used Old Church Slavonic in their work among the Slavs, and Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725), whose Westernizing policies opened Russian to western European languages. The 19th-century poet Aleksandr Pushkin, by combining colloquial and Old Slavonic diction in his writings, ended a controversy over which form of Russian was best for literary uses.
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