The first tribe to settle in Russia was the Cimmerians around 1,000 B.C. They may have introduced the use of iron to the area. The Scythians then replaced the Cimmerians as rulers around 700 B.C.
Around the same time, Greeks started to settle around the Black Sea in the Crimea (derived from "Cimmerian") with trading colonies and cities. The relations between the Greeks and the Scythians foreshadowed the future relationship between Russia and the Byzantine (Greek) Empire.
In the third century the Sarmatians, a mixed tribe of Scythians and Amazonians, began to move in from central Asia. They spoke an Iranian language and had replaced the Scythians as the ruling class by the second century. They were nomadic cattle-breeders living in wheeled felt huts, but adopted much of the Scythian culture and maintained the trade ties with the Black Sea Greeks. The last group of Sarmatians to arrive were the Alans, and one of their tribes was called "Rukhs-As," the fair-haired As, and an old theory claimed that that term gavie rise to the term "Russian." A competing theory claimed that another Sarmatian tribe, the Roxalani, became the Rosalani, then the Ros, and then the Rus.
During the first century A.D., the Goths started to move from the north... conquering and displacing the peoples they met. Among these peoples are mentioned the Venedae, the Sclaveni, and the Antes. The Goths generally adopted the culture of the Sarmatians, so that the period from 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. was a time of general cultural continuity for the Eurasian plain.
The Huns arrived in the fourth century A.D. from Central Asia. They crushed the Alans between the Don River and the Sea of Azov. Many Alans fled west, pursued by the Huns, who then fought the Goths. They forced the Visigoths (West Goths) and Ostrogoths (East Goths) and Alans out of the Eurasian plain. Luckily for western Europe, Attila died in 453 and his empire fell. But many historians believe that it was during this period of the Great Migration of Peoples that the Slavs began to migrate out of central and eastern Europe - heading east, south and west.
In the sixth century, the Slavic tribes had moved out of central Europe and spread along the Dnieper to form the nucleus of the eastern Slavs... the Great Russians, the White Russians (Belorussians), and the Little Russians (Ukrainians). Other Slavic tribes moved south into the Balkans and gave rise to the southern Slavs... Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bulgars. Slavic tribes also moved west to become the western Slavs... Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Moravians, Kashubs, and Wends.
After the Huns came the Avars, a mixed people of Turkish, Mongolian and Chinese decent, who conquered in the mid-sixth century and created a state reaching from the Volga River to the Elbe. They were powerful enough to pressure the Byzantine Empire into paying tribute in 581, and the Byzantine sources make it clear that Slavic groups were included in the Avar campaigns... refered to as Sclaveni. The Avars ruled until the seventh century when they were defeated by the Byzantine Empire. In the eighth century, the nomadic Turkic Khazars arrived along the Black and Caspian seas to rule over the trives now living in the Eurasian plain... Huns, Avars, Antes, Turks, and Slavs. The Khazars developed lively trading relationships with the Byzantine Empire to the west and the rising Arab Empire to the east, and served as the middlemen between these two empires and the tribes living to the north. As a result, south Russia as a fairly cosmopolitan region at this time. Also by the eighth century, Slavic tribes had settled permanently along the Dnieper River, forming the basis for the future Kievan state.