If you had read my first paragraph closely, you would have seen the following statement:
In this period, there really were no Eastern European states, at least not in the medieval sense of a state.
I've added the itallics now for emphasis. In Bungus' original post, he makes clear he is looking for something along the lines of a European medieval kingdom, and he gives the examples of the 9th century
Moravia Magna/"Greater Moravia". My point was that, in eastern Europe (excluding Byzantium of course), Greater Moravia was the first such state. He mentions the 'Dark Ages' but often that term is applied to wide time periods; some consider almost everything before the Renaissance to be the 'Dark Ages', which is why I defined the more traditional approach.
I separated the Steppe states (like the Avar and the Bulgar khanates) because they were qualitatively quite different from settled, established medieval European states. It's not a matter of one being more 'developed' or 'advanced' than the other; rather it's a matter of adapting to different circumstances. The Steppe region was a very fluid region historically with waves of semi-nomadic peoples convulsing westward from as far east as modern Manchuria and often spilling into eastern Europe via either the northern Polish-German plain, the Carpathian passes into Hungary and the northern Danube Basin, or southwards into the Balkans and the Danube delta. All along the Steppe route - Lake Balkhash, the Aral Sea, skirting the northern borders of settled ancient Central Asian civilizations, the Caspian Sea and the southern Urals, the Caucasus and the rolling southern Russian and Ukrainian plains, the Black Sea and finally eastern Europe - various clan-based empires sprung up built by peoples with strong equestrian traditions, with ephemeral borders (with few natural borders) and whose economies depended on tributes from conquered peoples and merchants, and raiding neighboring empires. They had no written laws but instead relied on tribal or clan customs and traditions. They also had no administration in the sense of coin minters, tax collectors, ambassadors, etc. What little trade that took place did so out of the state's hands, and involved almost completely barter - no coins or currencies. These empires could be quite powerful and effective military machines, capable of far greater military mobility and far wider-ranging projected power than more settled states but their weakness was their composition: usually comprising multiple clans and tribes bound together by success and necessity. In this way the successful Khazar empire came unraveled when several of its component groups - including the Magyars and the Bulgars - bolted the empire.
Medieval European states - remembering that Europe is a peninsula, with therefore fewer potential routes for external invasion - were based on settled agrarian economies that required forging social (= political) bonds above and beyond the clan, and whose economies were based on production and trade, and taxation of both. They tended to have far fewer military resources than the Steppe states (because they were bound to far stricter border deliniations and because the peoples in their realms played multiple - economic as well as military - rolls). To be sure the earliest medieval states in Europe - even western Europe - still had many of the Steppe state traits, which shouldn't be surprising since the Germanic peoples were also a product of the Steppe culture, with the Ostrogothic kingdom almost indistinguishable from the Hunnic in organization, but a crucial deciding factor that forced the medieval European states down a different developmental path was the city. Urban development completely transformed and reorganized medieval European social, economic and power structures. While Steppe states often occupied established cities and certainly had them within their territories, cities played only a minimal role in these empires and the true power structures - the clans - lay outside them. The Bulgars, for instance, occupied many old Roman or Byzantine towns (or Slavic agricultural centers, "oppida") and the camp they founded - Pliska - only later evolved into a full-fledged city, as befitted a medieval European state.
On that note, John V.A. Fine Jr., citing archaeological evidence, describes Pliska in around A.D. 700 as:
…a huge walled camp, lying on a plain, encompassing some twenty-three square kilometers. Inside were the Khan's palace, the yurts of his fellow tribesmen, warehouses, shops, and space for flocks and horses.
(Fine, 1991: pg. 68)
That Pliska was founded on a plain is indicative of the Steppe tradition - medieval cities were typically founded on naturally defensible topographies like swamps, hills, river bends, etc.
First Bulgarians( Bulgars as you call them)
I use that term, "Bulgars", to refer to the pre-Slavicized Bulgarians. The early Bulgars were no more Bulgarian than early Franks were French.
...are not " mixed group of Turkic Steppe tribes"
Are not, indeed, but were at one point. Scholars from all over the world have concurred that the language the early Bulgars spoke was a Turkic language. I know that today there is a local nationalist revolt in Bulgaria against any historic association with the Turkic peoples and their modern descendants, the Turkish, but no credible linguist has been able to refute modern Bulgarians' clear Turkic origins, not just in surviving lexical evidence but in grammatical imprints as well. Add to that surviving Byzantine accounts of early Bulgar and the much-studied impact early Bulgar had on surrounding language groups, and it is clear the early Bulgars spoke a Turkic language.
Here is a pathetic and sad exhibit of this modern nationalist fantasy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bulgars
As for the "mixed group of...tribes" part, yes I am fully aware of the successful Bulgar khanates on the Don River ("Great Bulgaria") and later the Volga - indeed, one of my favorite Hungarian paleo-linguists, István Fodor, has a fairly extensive section on the cultural impact these Bulgar states had on the early Magyars, including important technological loan words - but another trait of the Steppe empires was that they attracted many smaller or weaker groups, who trailed and clung to them. The Khanate of Great Bulgaria on the Don River was composed of not just "Bulgars" but a collection of Utigur and Kutrigur Hunnic tribes, Iranian-speaking Alans, Avars and other smaller Turkic-speaking groups. When this khanate was destroyed by the rising Khazar khanate, do you think only the Bulgars were dispersed, moving towards the Volga and the Balkans? Of course not; the Bulgars under Asparuch included many other non-Bulgar groups as well. You cannot equate these early Bulgar khanates with modern ethnic-based Bulgaria.
Again, these Bulgar states ("Greater Bulgaria") were
Steppe khanates, powerful Steppe empires but not medieval sedentary/agricultural states. Again, it's not a value comparison of which was "better", it's a description of two very different kinds of states.
When the Magyars entered the Carpathian Basin in the late 9th century, they brought with them their recognized clans but as well several groups historians, archaeologists and linguists have puzzled over since. Similarly, when the Bulgars crossed into eastern Europe - and they did not just head southwards into the Balkans; they also established themselves along the Danube in what is today Hungary - they also brought with them a myriad collection of peoples whose identities we will likely never know. That also means we'll never know what cultural or economic impact they may have had. Ethnicity was not a decisive factor for pre-modern peoples. The Avars, when they entered the Carpathian Basin in the 6th century brought with them, among other peoples, the Slavs.
They establieshed a real and strong state on the Balkans. With laws and administration. And it's completely fake to state that the Bulgarians rulled over the slavs.
I think you're confusing the later Bulgarian states of the 9th century - Khan Krum and the First Bulgarian Empire, etc. - with the period I am talking about, the late 7th and 8th century Bulgars. When the Bulgars first wrested territory away from the Byzantines and settled down under Asparuch/Isparich, they established a typical social and political order familiar to what they'd known on the Steppes. But this time they were immediately confronted by two different realities - the first was the Slavic peoples who had already been living in the region for nearly a century before the Bulgars arrived, who had adopted under Byzantine tutelage a very organized and agrarian existance. Some historians suspect the Slavs welcomed the Bulgars because the Bulgars ended Byzantine taxation practices. The second was the Byzantine empire itself, which while unable to stop the Bulgars from settling in the Balkans, did manage from the beginning to exert influence on the Bulgars and encourage the establishment of Byzantine-style institutions and practices. From the period of their establishment in the Balkans, c A.D. 698, until Khan Krum in A.D. 802 began to unite all the Danube Bulgars into the powerful "first" empire, a mere century, is a formative period in which the ruling Bulgar elite gradually blended with the surrounding Slavic society and also developed, often not in mimmickry but to counter, Byzantine-style state institutions. It is not a mistake that Khan Boris in the mid-9th century would call himself "tsar" (a Slavic derivation of "caesar"). By the time of Khan Krum, old Bulgar and the Slavs were united and indistinguishable - but that was not the case a century earlier.
If you want a comparison, when the Magyars first entered eastern Europe and set up shop in the Carpathian Basin in A.D. 895-896, they also created a Steppe state and did what was natural for Steppe khanates - they raided neighboring regions for income and collected tribute from the peoples who lived in the area they directly controlled - mostly Slavs and Avars left over from the collapsed Avar khanate. When the Magyars' main forces were devastatingly defeated at Lechfeld/Augsburg in A.D. 955 by Otto I, the man who would found the "Ottonian" empire (for Otto I, II & III) that would eventually become the Holy Roman Empire, the Magyars very wisely decided to adapt to their neighbors and set out under Géza and his son Vajk/István (Stephen) to transform their Steppe state into an established Christian/European-style medieval kingdom. There is a huge qualitative difference the Magyars under A'rpád in the late 9th century and the Hungarian kingdom founded by Géza and István in the late 10th/early 11th centuries. A similar difference can be found when comparing the Asparuch Bulgar state to Khan Krum's Bulgarian empire.
SO - to get back to Bungus' original question - my ultimate answer is that the Dark Ages were not a period of states in eastern Europe, despite the existence of the Avar and Bulgar khanates - both of which I mentioned, although I would now add that the Avars were the more powerful of the two at the time. In the 9th century, almost immediately from the beginning we see a flowering of states in eastern Europe - the Bulgar khanate evolves into the First Bulgarian empire, Mojmir founds the Moravian (and later Bohemian) states, Croatia is founded, and in the 10th century we see an even bigger explosion - Hungary, Poland, Serbia, etc. etc. etc. But that's why I drew the period line at the 9th century, coinciding with Charlemagne in western Europe.
To throw a few references out there to show you where I am getting this all from, I'll list the following:
Barford, P.M. -
The Early Slavs, Cornell University Press, Ithaca (NY) 2001: Describes the Bulgar invasion of the 7th century from the Slavic and Byzantine viewpoints, and also describes in some detail the Slavicization of the Bulgar elites.
Fine, Jr.; John V.A. -
The Early Medieval Balkans, a Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor (MI), 1991: Excellent description of the early Bulgars as they entered the Balkans.
Fodor, István -
In Search of a New Homeland, the Prehistory of the Hungarian People and the Conquest, Corvina Books, Budapest 1975: Great descriptions of Bulgar linguistic impact on early Magyar.
Magocsi, Paul Robert -
Historical Atlas of East Central Europe, Vol. I of
A History of East Central Europe, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1993: Good overview of the Bulgar invasion of the Balkans and early state formation.
Pálóczi Horváth, A'ndrás -
Pechenegs, Cumans, Iasians, Steppe Peoples in Medieval Hungary, Corvina Books, Budapest, 1989: Good for a comparison of a former Steppe people (Hungarians) and contemporary Steppe peoples (Cumanians, Pechenegs, Iasians).
Sedlar, Jean W. -
East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000-1500, Vol. III of
A History of East Central Europe, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1994: Parallels the development story in the Barford book.
Very limited information about daily life in this period, though I could dig some. A brief historical overview of the Moravian empire/Greater Moravia follows, but I'll read up over the next few days to see if much is available. Between the job, wife and life I only have limited time so please be patient as I find time to write. 
