You can read about the earlier developments in Russian names in the previous article. After Christianity came, giving so-called "calendar" first names became common practice. They are called calendar because they were given on the basis of Church calendar, where almost every day was the day of some particular saint or even several. If a child was born on a day when no saint's holiday was celebrated, the closest saint on the timeline was picked. Christianity was introduced partly by force in the X century AD, it was a condition of giving Byzantium as an ally. Christening was a new ritual that was accompanied by giving new Christian names. People accepted those new Russian names very slowly.
There was another trend that appeared somewhere in the Middle Ages. Russians never had second names, and the only token of belonging to a family was the family name. As the population was growing, and with the advent of passports, one had to use his father's name to distinguish his origin. Patronymics emerged in place of European second names. They consisted of the actual name of the father plus the suffix "vich".
In the first years after the October Revolution the majority of babies got traditional Russian names. However, after the end of the civil war things began to change. Church weddings became less common, and babies were now always officially registered in civilian registry offices all over the country. With the stress on modernization, the advent of electricity and new technologies, strange names emerged. Energia and Idea could have been the girls next door, and Pioneriy - your best friend. Compounds were widely used, for example, Vladlen is a hybrid of Vladimir Lenin. Most of those Russian names are not encountered nowadays.