Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Slavic autonym, reconstructed in Proto-Slavic as Slovene, most likely derives from slovo, meaning "word", and was understood to mean "people who speak the same language" or "people who understand one another". The oldest external use of the ethnonym appears in 6th-century Byzantine Greek writings by Procopius, in forms like Sklaboi and Sklabēnoi.
A 2025 archaeogenetic study published in Nature identified the best spatial proxy for the Slavic homeland as the south of present-day Belarus and the north of Ukraine, consistent with what archaeologists call the Kyiv culture. A 2006 Y-DNA study similarly placed the earliest known Slavic homeland in the basin of the middle Dnieper.
The first known Slavic state in Central Europe was Samo's Empire, formed in the 7th century when the Frankish merchant Samo supported the Slavs against their Avar rulers and became their ruler. The empire probably did not outlive its founder, but it preceded later West Slavic states that formed on the same territory.
Slavic peoples are classified into West Slavs, East Slavs, and South Slavs. West Slavs include Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, Sorbs, Moravians, Silesians, and Kashubians; East Slavs include Belarusians, Russians, Rusyns, and Ukrainians; South Slavs include Bosniaks, Bulgarians, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, Slovenes, and others.
Generalplan Ost was a German plan begun in early 1941 for the genocide of Slavic peoples in Eastern Europe, intended to be carried out over 25-30 years. It called for the starvation of approximately 30 million Slavs and the depopulation of their major cities so Eastern Europe could be resettled by ethnic Germans. Millions of Slavs were murdered during World War II, including 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war.
The alphabet used by a Slavic group reflects its dominant religion. Orthodox Christian Slavs use the Cyrillic alphabet, while Catholic Slavs use the Latin alphabet. Muslim Slavs such as the Bosniaks use the Latin alphabet, though Cyrillic is also used in Serbia. Serbian and Montenegrin are written in both scripts.