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History of Russia

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                                                         History of Russia
                                                          Early East Slavs
                                                                   Khazars
                                                            Rus' Khaganate
                                                               Kievan Rus'
                                                           Vladimir-Suzdal
                                                         Novgorod Republic
                                                            Volga Bulgaria
                                                           Mongol invasion
                                                              Golden Horde
                                                                   Muscovy
                                                          Khanate of Kazan
                                                            Russian Empire
                                                        Revolution of 1905
                                                        Revolution of 1917
                                                                 Civil War
                                                              Soviet Union
                                                        Russian Federation

   The history of Russia begins with that of the East Slavs, the ethnic
   group that eventually split into the Russians, Ukrainians, and
   Belarusians. The first East Slavic state, Kievan Rus', adopted
   Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning the synthesis
   of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the
   next seven centuries. Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state,
   leaving a number of states competing for claims to be the heirs to its
   civilization and dominant position.

   After the 13th century, Muscovy gradually came to dominate the former
   cultural centre. By the 18th century, the principality of Moscow had
   become the huge Russian Empire, stretching from Poland eastward to the
   Pacific Ocean. Expansion in the western direction sharpened Russia's
   awareness of its backwardness and shattered the isolation in which the
   initial stages of expansion had occurred. Successive regimes of the
   19th century responded to such pressures with a combination of
   halfhearted reform and repression. Russian serfdom was abolished in
   1861, but its abolition was achieved on terms unfavorable to the
   peasants and served to increase revolutionary pressures. Between the
   abolition of serfdom and the beginning of World War I in 1914, the
   Stolypin reforms, the constitution of 1906 and State Duma introduced
   notable changes in economy and politics of Russia, but the tsars were
   still not willing to cede autocratic rule.

   Military defeat and food shortages triggered the Russian Revolution in
   1917, bringing the Communist Bolsheviks to power. Between 1922 and
   1991, the history of Russia is essentially the history of the Soviet
   Union, effectively an ideologically based empire which was roughly
   coterminous with the Russian Empire. From its first years, government
   in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the communists,
   as the Bolsheviks called themselves beginning in March 1918. However,
   by the late 1980s, with the weaknesses of its economic and political
   structures becoming acute, significant changes in the economy and the
   party leaderships spelled the end of the Soviet Union.

   Thus the history of the modern Russian Federation is brief, dating back
   only to the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. Since gaining
   its independence, Russia claimed to be the legal successor to the
   Soviet Union on the international stage. However, Russia has lost its
   superpower status as it faced serious challenges in its efforts to
   forge a new post-Soviet political and economic system. Scrapping the
   socialist central planning and state ownership of property of the
   Soviet era, Russia attempted to build an economy with elements of
   market capitalism, with often painful results. Even today Russia shares
   many continuities of political culture and social structure with its
   tsarist and Soviet past.

Early history

   Kurgan hypothesis: South Russia as the urheimat of Indo-European
   peoples.
   Enlarge
   Kurgan hypothesis: South Russia as the urheimat of Indo-European
   peoples.

Pre-Slavic inhabitants

   Prior to the Christian era, the vast steppes of South Russia were home
   to disunited tribes, such as Proto-Indo-Europeans and Scythians.
   Astonishing remnants of these long-gone steppe civilizations were
   discovered in the course of the 20th century in such places as Ipatovo,
   Sintashta, Arkaim, and Pazyryk.

   In the 7th century BC, the Greek merchants brought the classical
   civilization to the trade emporiums in Tanais and Phanagoria. Between
   the third and sixth centuries AD, the Bosporan Kingdom, a Hellenistic
   polity which succeeded the Greek colonies, was overwhelmed by
   successive waves of nomadic invasions, led by warlike tribes which
   would often move on to Europe, as was the case with Huns and Turkish
   Avars.

   A Turkic people, the Khazars, ruled the lower Volga basin steppes
   between the Caspian and Black Seas through the 8th century. Noted for
   their laws, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism, the Khazars were the main
   commercial link between the Baltic and the Muslim Abbasid empire
   centered in Baghdad. They were important allies of the Byzantine Empire
   and waged a series of successful wars against the Arab Califates. In
   the 8th century, the Khazars embraced Judaism.
   An approximative map of the cultures in European Russia at the arrival
   of the Varangians
   Enlarge
   An approximative map of the cultures in European Russia at the arrival
   of the Varangians

Early East Slavs

   The ancestors of the Russians were the Slavic tribes, whose original
   home is thought by some scholars to have been the wooded areas of the
   Pripet Marshes. Moving into the lands vacated by the migrating Germanic
   tribes, the Early East Slavs gradually settled Western Russia in two
   waves: one moving from Kiev towards present-day Suzdal and Murom and
   another from Polotsk towards Novgorod and Rostov. From the 7th century
   onwards, the East Slavs constituted the bulk of the population in
   Western Russia and slowly but peacefully assimilated the native
   Finno-Ugric tribes, such as the Merya, the Muromians and the Meshchera.

Kievan Rus'

   Kievan Rus' in the 11th century.
   Enlarge
   Kievan Rus' in the 11th century.

   Scandinavian Norsemen, called "Vikings" in Western Europe and "
   Varangians" in the East, combined piracy and trade in their roamings
   over much of Northern Europe. In the mid-9th century, they began to
   venture along the waterways from the eastern Baltic to the Black and
   Caspian Seas. The Slavic settlers along the rivers often hired the
   Varangians as protectors. According to the earliest chronicle of Kievan
   Rus', a Varangian named Rurik was elected ruler ( konung or knyaz) of
   Novgorod in about 860 before his successors moved south and extended
   their authority to Kiev, which had been previously dominated by the
   Khazars.

   Thus, the first East Slavic state, Kievan Rus', emerged in the 9th
   century along the Dnieper River valley. A coordinated group of princely
   states with a common interest in maintaining trade along the river
   routes, Kievan Rus' controlled the trade route for furs, wax, and
   slaves between Scandinavia and the Byzantine Empire along the Volkhov
   and Dnieper Rivers.

   The name "Russia," together with the Finnish Ruotsi and Estonian
   Rootsi, are found by some scholars to be related to Roslagen. The
   meaning of Rus is debated, and other schools of thought connect the
   name with Slavic or Iranic roots. (See Etymology of Rus and
   derivatives).

   By the end of the 10th century, the Norse minority had merged with the
   Slavic population which also absorbed Greek Christian influences in the
   course of the multiple campaigns to loot Tsargrad, or Constantinople.
   One of such campaigns claimed the life of the foremost Slavic druzhina
   leader, Svyatoslav I, renowned for having crushed the power of the
   Khazars on the Volga. While the fortunes of the Byzantine Empire had
   been ebbing, its culture was a continuous influence upon the
   development of Russia in its formative centuries.

   Among the lasting achievements of Kievan Rus' are the introduction of a
   Slavic variant of the Eastern Orthodox religion, dramatically deepening
   a synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian
   culture for the next thousand years. The region adopted Christianity in
   988 by the official act of public baptism of Kiev inhabitants by Prince
   Vladimir I. Some years later the first code of laws, Russkaya Pravda,
   was introduced. From the onset the Kievan princes followed the
   Byzantine example and kept the Church dependent on them, even for its
   revenues, so that the Russian Church and state were always closely
   linked.
   The Byzantine influence on Russian architecture is evident in Hagia
   Sophia in Kiev, originally built in the 11th century by Yaroslav the
   Wise.
   Enlarge
   The Byzantine influence on Russian architecture is evident in Hagia
   Sophia in Kiev, originally built in the 11th century by Yaroslav the
   Wise.

   By the 11th century, particularly during the reign of Yaroslav the
   Wise, Kievan Rus' could boast an economy and achievements in
   architecture and literature superior to those that then existed in the
   western part of the continent. Compared with the languages of European
   Christendom, the Russian language was little influenced by the Greek
   and Latin of early Christian writings. This was due to the fact that
   Church Slavonic was used directly in liturgy instead.

   Nomadic Turkic people Kipchaks replaced the earlier Pechenegs as a
   dominant force in the south steppe regions neighboring to Rus' at the
   end of 11th century and founded a nomadic state in the steppes along
   the Black Sea (Desht-e-Kipchak). Repelling their regular attacks,
   especially on Kiev, which was just one day riding away from the steppe,
   was a heavy burden for the southern areas of Rus'. The nomadic
   incursions caused a massive influx of Slavic population to the safer,
   heavily forested regions of the North, particularly to the area known
   as Zalesye.

   Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state because of the armed
   struggles among members of the princely family that collectively
   possessed it. Kiev's dominance waned, to the benefit of Vladimir-Suzdal
   in the north-east, Novgorod in the north, and Halych-Volhynia in the
   south-west. Conquest by the Mongol Golden Horde in the 13th century was
   the final blow. Kiev was destroyed. Halych-Volhynia would eventually be
   absorbed into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, while the
   Mongol-dominated Vladimir-Suzdal and independent Novgorod Republic
   would establish the basis for the modern Russian nation.

Mongol Invasion

   The invading Mongols accelerated the fragmentation of the Ancient Rus'.
   In 1223, the disunited southern princes faced a Mongol raiding party at
   the Kalka River and were soundly defeated. In 1237 the Mongols sacked
   the city of Vladimir, routed the Russians at the Sit' River and then
   moved west into Poland and Hungary. By then they had conquered most of
   the Russian principalities. Only the Novgorod Republic escaped
   occupation and continued to flourish in the orbit of the Hanseatic
   League.

   The impact of the Mongol invasion on the territories of Kievan Rus' was
   uneven. The advanced city culture was almost completely destroyed. As
   older centers such as Kiev and Vladimir never recovered from the
   devastation of the initial attack, the new cities of Moscow, Tver and
   Nizhny Novgorod began to compete for hegemony in the Mongol-dominated
   Russia. Although a Russian army defeated the Golden Horde at Kulikovo
   in 1380, Tatar domination of the Russian-inhabited territories, along
   with demands of tribute from Russian princes, continued until about
   1480.

Russo-Tatar relations

   Alexander Nevsky
   Enlarge
   Alexander Nevsky

   After the fall of the Khazars in the 10th century, the middle Volga
   came to be dominated by the mercantile state of Volga Bulgaria, the
   last vestige of Greater Bulgaria centred at Phanagoria. In the 10th
   century the Turkic population of Volga Bulgaria converted to Islam,
   which facilitated its trade with the Middle East and Central Asia. In
   the wake of the Mongol invasions of the 1230s, Volga Bulgaria was
   absorbed by the Golden Horde and its population evolved into the modern
   Chuvashes and Kazan Tatars.

   The Mongols held Russia and Volga Bulgaria in sway from their western
   capital at Sarai, one of the largest cities of the medieval world. The
   princes of southern and eastern Russia had to pay tribute to the
   Mongols of the Golden Horde, commonly called Tatars; but in return they
   received charters authorizing them to act as deputies to the khans. In
   general, the princes were allowed considerable freedom to rule as they
   wished, while the Russian Orthodox Church even experienced a spiritual
   revival under the guidance of Metropolitan Alexis and Sergius of
   Radonezh.

   To the Orthodox Church and most princes, the fanatical Northern
   Crusaders seemed a greater threat to the Russian way of life than the
   Mongols. In the mid-13th century, Alexander Nevsky, elected prince of
   Novgorod, acquired heroic status as the result of major victories over
   the Teutonic Knights and the Swedes. Alexander obtained Mongol
   protection and assistance in fighting invaders from the west who,
   hoping to profit from the Russian collapse since the Mongol invasions,
   tried to grab territory and convert the Russians into Roman
   Catholicism.

   The Mongols left their impact on the Russians in such areas as military
   tactics and transportation. Under Mongol occupation, Muscovite Russia
   also developed its postal road network, census, fiscal system, and
   military organization. Eastern influence remained strong well until the
   17th century, when Russian rulers made a conscious effort to Westernize
   their country.

Muscovy

The rise of Moscow

   Daniil Aleksandrovich, the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, founded
   the principality of Moscow (known in the western tradition as Muscovy),
   which eventually expelled the Tatars from Russia. Well-situated in the
   central river system of Russia and surrounded by protective forests and
   marshes, Muscovy was at first only a vassal of Vladimir, but soon it
   absorbed its parent state. A major factor in the ascendancy of Muscovy
   was the cooperation of its rulers with the Mongol overlords, who
   granted them the title of Grand Prince of Russia and made them agents
   for collecting the Tatar tribute from the Russian principalities. The
   principality's prestige was further enhanced when it became the centre
   of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its head, the metropolitan, fled from
   Kiev to Vladimir in 1299 and a few years later established the
   permanent headquarters of the Church in Moscow.

   By the middle of the 14th century, the power of the Mongols was
   declining, and the Grand Princes felt able to openly oppose the Mongol
   yoke. In 1380, at Kulikovo on the Don River, the khan was defeated, and
   although this hard-fought victory did not end Tatar rule of Russia, it
   did bring great fame to the Grand Prince. Moscow's leadership in Russia
   was now firmly based and by the middle of the fourteenth century its
   territory had greatly expanded through purchase, war, and marriage.

Ivan III, the Great

   In the 15th century, the grand princes of Muscovy went on gathering
   Russian lands to increase the population and wealth under their rule.
   The most successful practitioner of this process was Ivan III, the
   Great (1462–1505), who laid the foundations for a Russian national
   state. Ivan competed with his powerful northwestern rival, Grand Duchy
   of Lithuania, for control over some of the semi-independent Upper
   Principalities in the upper Dnieper and Oka River basins. Through the
   defections of some princes, border skirmishes, and a long war with the
   Novgorod Republic, Ivan III was able to annex Novgorod and Tver. As a
   result, Muscovy tripled in size under his rule. During his conflict
   with Pskov, monk Filofei composed a letter to Ivan III, with prophecy
   that the latter's kingdom will be the Third Rome. The Fall of
   Constantinople and the death of the last Greek Orthodox Christian
   emperor contributed to this new idea of Moscow as 'New Rome' and the
   seat of Orthodox Christianity.

   A contemporary of the Tudors and other "new monarchs" in Western
   Europe, Ivan proclaimed his absolute sovereignty over all Russian
   princes and nobles. Refusing further tribute to the Tatars, Ivan
   initiated a series of attacks that opened the way for the complete
   defeat of the declining Golden Horde, now divided into several khanates
   and hordes. Ivan and his successors sought to protect the southern
   boundaries of their domain against attacks of the Crimean Tatars and
   other hordes. To achieve this aim, they sponsored the construction of
   the Great Abatis Belt and granted manors to nobles, who were obliged to
   serve in the military. The manor system provided a basis for an
   emerging horse army.

   In this way, internal consolidation accompanied outward expansion of
   the state. By the 16th century, the rulers of Moscow considered the
   entire Russian territory their collective property. Various
   semi-independent princes still claimed specific territories, but Ivan
   III forced the lesser princes to acknowledge the grand prince of
   Muscovy and his descendants as unquestioned rulers with control over
   military, judicial, and foreign affairs. Gradually, the Muscovite ruler
   emerged as a powerful, autocratic ruler, a tsar. The first Muscovite
   ruler to use the title of " Tsar" was Ivan IV.

Ivan IV, the Terrible

   Portrait of Ivan the Terrible.
   Enlarge
   Portrait of Ivan the Terrible.

   The development of the tsar's autocratic powers reached a peak during
   the reign (1547–1584) of Ivan IV ("Ivan the Terrible"), he strengthened
   the position of the monarch to an unprecedented degree, as he
   ruthlessly subordinated the nobles to his will, exiling or executing
   many on the slightest provocation. Nevertheless, Ivan was a farsighted
   statesman who promulgated a new code of laws, reformed the morals of
   the clergy, and established the diplomatic and trade relations with the
   Low Countries and England.

   Although his long Livonian War for the control of the Baltic coast
   ultimately proved a costly failure, Ivan managed to annex the Khanates
   of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia. Through these conquests, Russia
   acquired a significant Muslim Tatar population and emerged as a
   multiethnic and multiconfessional state. Also around this period, the
   mercantile Stroganov family established a firm foothold at the Urals
   and recruited Russian Cossacks to colonize Siberia.

Time of Troubles

   Death of Ivan's childless son Feodor was followed by a period of civil
   wars and foreign intervention known as the " Time of Troubles"
   (1606-13). The autocracy survived the "Time of Troubles" and the rule
   of weak or corrupt tsars because of the strength of the government's
   central bureaucracy. Government functionaries continued to serve,
   regardless of the ruler's legitimacy or the faction controlling the
   throne. The succession disputes during the "Time of Troubles" caused
   the loss of much territory to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and
   Sweden in the conflicts such as the Dymitriads and the Ingrian War.

The Romanovs

   A painting of a 17th century Moscow street holiday by Andrei Ryabushkin
   Enlarge
   A painting of a 17th century Moscow street holiday by Andrei Ryabushkin

   The Time of Troubles was brought to an end in 1612, when a patriotic
   volunteer army expelled the Poles from the Moscow Kremlin and a
   national assembly, composed of representatives from fifty cities and
   even some peasants, elected to the throne Michael Romanov, the young
   son of Patriarch Filaret. The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia until 1917.

   The immediate task of the new dynasty was to restore peace. Fortunately
   for Moscow, its major enemies, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and
   Sweden, were engaged in a bitter conflict with each other, which
   provided Muscovy the opportunity to make peace with Sweden in 1617 and
   to sign a truce with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1619.
   Recovery of lost territories started in the mid-17th century, when the
   Khmelnitsky Uprising of the Ukrainian Cossacks triggered a prolonged
   Russo-Polish War. The resultant Treaty of Andrusovo (1667) brought
   substantial gains, including Smolensk, Kiev and the eastern half of
   Ukraine.

   Rather than risk their estates in more civil war, the great nobles or
   boyars cooperated with the first Romanovs, enabling them to finish the
   work of bureaucratic centralization. Thus, the state required service
   from both the old and the new nobility, primarily in the military. In
   return the tsars allowed the boyars to complete the process of
   enserfing the peasants.

   In the preceding century, the state had gradually curtailed peasants'
   rights to move from one landlord to another. With the state now fully
   sanctioning serfdom, runaway peasants became state fugitives. Landlords
   had complete power over their peasants and could alienate and transfer
   them without the land to other landowners. Together the state and the
   nobles placed the overwhelming burden of taxation on the peasants,
   whose rate was 100 times greater in the mid-17th century than it had
   been a century earlier. In addition, middle-class urban tradesmen and
   craftsmen were assessed taxes, and, like the serfs, they were forbidden
   to change residence. All segments of the population were subject to
   military levy and to special taxes.

   Under such circumstances, peasant disorders were endemic and even the
   citizens of Moscow revolted against the Romanovs during the Copper
   Riot, Salt Riot, and the Moscow Uprising of 1682. By far the greatest
   peasant uprising in 17th century Europe erupted in 1667. As the free
   settlers of South Russia, the Cossacks, reacted against the growing
   centralization of the state, serfs escaped from their landlords and
   joined the rebels. The Cossack leader Stenka Razin led his followers up
   the Volga River, inciting peasant uprisings and replacing local
   governments with Cossack rule. The tsar's army finally crushed his
   forces in 1670; a year later Stenka was captured and beheaded. Yet,
   less than half a century later, the strains of military expeditions
   produced another revolt in Astrakhan, ultimately subdued.

Imperial Russia

   A map of Russian expansion from 1533 to 1896. Ivan IV conquered the
   Tatar states of Kazan (1533-84) and Astrakhan (1556), gaining control
   of the Volga River down to the Caspian Sea. In addition, from the
   1580s, the fur trade lured the Russians deep into Siberia across the
   Urals. Peter the Great concentrated on achieving a window on the West,
   wresting the Baltic region from Sweden in 1721. Catherine the Great
   annexed the Tatar khanate of Crimea and acquired parts of
   Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Russian forces subdued the Kazaks
   (1816-54), completed Russian control of the Caucasus (1857-64) and
   annexed the khanates of Central Asia (1865-76). China ceded to the tsar
   the Amur basin and parts of the Pacific Coast (where Vladivostok was
   founded in 1860), and leased Port Arthur (1898).
   Enlarge
   A map of Russian expansion from 1533 to 1896. Ivan IV conquered the
   Tatar states of Kazan (1533-84) and Astrakhan (1556), gaining control
   of the Volga River down to the Caspian Sea. In addition, from the
   1580s, the fur trade lured the Russians deep into Siberia across the
   Urals. Peter the Great concentrated on achieving a window on the West,
   wresting the Baltic region from Sweden in 1721. Catherine the Great
   annexed the Tatar khanate of Crimea and acquired parts of
   Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Russian forces subdued the Kazaks
   (1816-54), completed Russian control of the Caucasus (1857-64) and
   annexed the khanates of Central Asia (1865-76). China ceded to the tsar
   the Amur basin and parts of the Pacific Coast (where Vladivostok was
   founded in 1860), and leased Port Arthur (1898).

Peter the Great

   Peter I, the Great (1672–1725), consolidated autocracy in Russia and
   played a major role in bringing his country into the European state
   system. From its modest beginnings in the 14th century principality of
   Moscow, Russia had become the largest state in the world by Peter's
   time. Three times the size of continental Europe, it spanned the
   Eurasian landmass from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Much of its
   expansion had taken place in the 17th century, culminating in the first
   Russian settlement of the Pacific in the mid-17th century, the
   reconquest of Kiev, and the pacification of the Siberian tribes.
   However, this vast land had a population of only 14 million. Grain
   yields trailed behind those of agriculture in the West, compelling
   almost the entire population to farm. Only a small fraction of the
   population lived in the towns.

   Peter was deeply impressed by the advanced technology, warcraft, and
   statecraft of the West. He studied Western tactics and fortifications
   and built a strong army of 300,000 made up of his own subjects, whom he
   conscripted for life. In 1697-1698, he became the first Russian prince
   to ever visit the West, where he and his entourage made a deep
   impression. In celebration of his conquests, Peter assumed the title of
   emperor as well as tsar, and Muscovite Russia officially became the
   Russian Empire in 1721.

   Peter's first military efforts were directed against the Ottoman Turks.
   His attention then turned to the north. Peter still lacked a secure
   northern seaport except at Archangel on the White Sea, whose harbour
   was frozen nine months a year. Access to the Baltic was blocked by
   Sweden, whose territory enclosed it on three sides. Peter's ambitions
   for a "window to the sea" led him in 1699 to make a secret alliance
   with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Denmark against Sweden,
   resulting in the Great Northern War. The war ended in 1721 when an
   exhausted Sweden sued for peace with Russia. Peter acquired four
   provinces situated south and east of the Gulf of Finland, thus securing
   his coveted access to the sea. There he built Russia's new capital, St.
   Petersburg, as a "window opened upon Europe" to replace Moscow, long
   Russia's cultural centre.

   Peter reorganized his government on the latest Western models, molding
   Russia into an absolutist state. He replaced the old boyar Duma
   (council of nobles) with a nine-member senate, in effect a supreme
   council of state. The countryside was also divided into new provinces
   and districts. Peter told the senate that its mission was to collect
   tax revenues. In turn tax revenues tripled over the course of his
   reign. As part of the government reform, the Orthodox Church was
   partially incorporated into the country's administrative structure, in
   effect making it a tool of the state. Peter abolished the patriarchate
   and replaced it with a collective body, the Holy Synod, led by a lay
   government official. Meanwhile, all vestiges of local self-government
   were removed, and Peter continued and intensified his predecessors'
   requirement of state service for all nobles.

   Peter died in 1725, leaving an unsettled succession and an exhausted
   realm. His reign raised questions about Russia's backwardness, its
   relationship to the West, the appropriateness of reform from above, and
   other fundamental problems that have confronted many of Russia's
   subsequent rulers. Nevertheless, he had laid the foundations of a
   modern state in Russia.

Ruling the Empire (1725–1825)

   A 1862 monument celebrating the Millennium of Russia.
   Enlarge
   A 1862 monument celebrating the Millennium of Russia.

   Nearly forty years were to pass before a comparably ambitious and
   ruthless ruler appeared on the Russian throne. Catherine II, the Great,
   was a German princess who married the German heir to the Russian crown.
   Finding him an incompetent moron, Catherine tacitly consented to his
   murder. It was announced that he had died of " apoplexy", and in 1762
   she became ruler.

   Catherine contributed to the resurgence of the Russian nobility that
   began after the death of Peter the Great. State service had been
   abolished, and Catherine delighted the nobles further by turning over
   most government functions in the provinces to them.

   Catherine the Great extended Russian political control over the
   Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with actions including the support of
   the Targowica confederation, although the cost of her campaigns, on top
   of the oppressive social system that required lords' serfs to spend
   almost all of their time laboring on the lords' land, provoked a major
   peasant uprising in 1773, after Catherine legalized the selling of
   serfs separate from land. Inspired by another Cossack named Pugachev,
   with the emphatic cry of "Hang all the landlords!" the rebels
   threatened to take Moscow before they were ruthlessly suppressed.
   Catherine had Pugachev drawn and quartered in Red Square, but the
   specter of revolution continued to haunt her and her successors.

   While suppressing the Russian peasantry, Catherine successfully waged
   war against the decaying Ottoman Empire and advanced Russia's southern
   boundary to the Black Sea. Then, by allying with the rulers of Austria
   and Prussia, she incorporated the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories
   of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Partitions of Poland,
   pushing the Russian frontier westward into Central Europe. By the time
   of her death in 1796, Catherine's expansionist policy had made Russia
   into a major European power. This continued with Alexander I's wresting
   of Finland from the weakened kingdom of Sweden in 1809 and of
   Bessarabia from the Ottomans in 1812.

   Napoleon made a major misstep when he invaded Russia after a dispute
   with Tsar Alexander I and launched an invasion of the tsar's realm in
   1812. The campaign was a catastrophe. Although Napoleon's Grand Army
   made its way to Moscow, the Russians' scorched-earth strategy prevented
   the invaders from living off the country. In the bitterly cold Russian
   weather, thousands of French troops were ambushed and killed by peasant
   guerrilla fighters. As Napoleon's forces retreated, the Russian troops
   pursued them into Central and Western Europe and to the gates of Paris.
   After Russia and its allies defeated Napoleon, Alexander became known
   as the 'savior of Europe,' and he presided over the redrawing of the
   map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1815), which made Alexander
   the monarch of Congress Poland.

   Although the Russian Empire would play a leading political role in the
   next century, secured by its defeat of Napoleonic France, its retention
   of serfdom precluded economic progress of any significant degree. As
   West European economic growth accelerated during the Industrial
   Revolution, which had begun in the second half of the 18th century,
   Russia began to lag ever farther behind, creating new problems for the
   empire as a great power.

Imperial Russia since the Decembrist Revolt (1825–1917)

The Decembrist Revolt

   Russia's great power status obscured the inefficiency of its
   government, the isolation of its people, and its economic backwardness.
   Following the defeat of Napoleon, Alexander I had been ready to discuss
   constitutional reforms, but though a few were introduced, no
   thoroughgoing changes were attempted.

   The relatively liberal tsar was replaced by his younger brother,
   Nicholas I (1825–1855), who at the onset of his reign was confronted
   with an uprising. The background of this revolt lay in the Napoleonic
   Wars, when a number of well-educated Russian officers traveled in
   Europe in the course of the military campaigns, where their exposure to
   the liberalism of Western Europe encouraged them to seek change on
   their return to autocratic Russia. The result was the Decembrist Revolt
   (December 1825), the work of a small circle of liberal nobles and army
   officers who wanted to install Nicholas' brother as a constitutional
   monarch. But the revolt was easily crushed, leading Nicholas to turn
   away from the Westernization program begun by Peter the Great and
   champion the maxim " Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Respect to the People."

   After the Russian armies occupied allied Georgia in 1802, they clashed
   with Persia over control of Azerbaijan and got involved into the
   Caucasian War against mountaineers, which would lumber on for half a
   century. Russian tsars had also to deal with the unrest in their newly
   acquired territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth where the
   population discontented by the loss of independence staged two armed
   revolts. As a result, the initially moderate Russian policies there
   turned increasingly autocratic.

Ideological schisms and reaction

   Mikhail Bakunin
   Enlarge
   Mikhail Bakunin

   The harsh retaliation for the revolt made "December Fourteenth" a day
   long remembered by later revolutionary movements. In order to repress
   further revolts, schools and universities were placed under constant
   surveillance and students were provided with official textbooks. Police
   spies were planted everywhere. Would-be revolutionaries were sent off
   to Siberia; under Nicholas I hundreds of thousands were sent to katorga
   there.

   In this setting Michael Bakunin would emerge as the father of
   anarchism. He left Russia in 1842 to Western Europe, where he became
   active in the socialist movement. After participating in the May
   Uprising in Dresden of 1849, he was imprisoned and shipped to Siberia,
   but eventually escaped and made his way back to Europe. There he
   practically joined forces with Karl Marx, despite significant
   ideological and tactical differences. Alternative social doctrines were
   elaborated by such Russian radicals as Alexander Herzen and Peter
   Kropotkin.

   The question of Russia's direction had been gaining steam ever since
   Peter the Great's programme of Westernization. Some favored imitating
   Europe while others renounced the West and called for a return of the
   traditions of the past. The latter path was championed by Slavophiles,
   who heaped scorn on the "decadent" West. The Slavophiles were opponents
   of bureaucracy, preferred the collectivism of the mediaeval Russian
   mir, or village community, to the individualism of the West.

Alexander II and the abolition of serfdom

   Tsar Nicholas died with his philosophy in dispute. One year earlier,
   Russia had become involved in the Crimean War, a conflict fought
   primarily in the Crimean peninsula. Since playing a major role in the
   defeat of Napoleon, Russia had been regarded as militarily invincible,
   but, once pitted against a coalition of the great powers of Europe, the
   reverses it suffered on land and sea exposed the decay and weakness of
   Tsar Nicholas' regime.

   When Alexander II came to the throne in 1855, desire for reform was
   widespread. A growing humanitarian movement, which in later years has
   been likened to that of the abolitionists in the United States before
   the American Civil War, attacked serfdom. In 1859, there were more than
   23 million serfs living under conditions frequently worse than those of
   the peasants of western Europe on 16th century manors. Alexander II
   made up his own mind to abolish serfdom from above rather than wait for
   it to be abolished from below through revolution.

   The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was the single most important
   event in 19th century Russian history. It was the beginning of the end
   for the landed aristocracy's monopoly of power. Emancipation brought a
   supply of free labor to the cities, industry was stimulated, and the
   middle class grew in number and influence; however, instead of
   receiving their lands as a gift, the freed peasants had to pay a
   special tax for what amounted to their lifetime to the government,
   which in turn paid the landlords a generous price for the land that
   they had lost. In numerous instances the peasants wound up with the
   poorest land. All the land turned over to the peasants was owned
   collectively by the mir, the village community, which divided the land
   among the peasants and supervised the various holdings. Although
   serfdom was abolished, since its abolition was achieved on terms
   unfavorable to the peasants, revolutionary tensions were not abated,
   despite Alexander II's intentions.

   In the late 1870s Russia and the Ottoman Empire again clashed in the
   Balkans. From 1875 to 1877, the Balkan crisis escalated with rebellions
   against Ottoman rule by various Slavic nationalities, which the Ottoman
   Turks suppressed with what was seen as great cruelty in Russia. Russian
   nationalist opinion became a serious domestic factor in its support for
   liberating Balkan Christians from Ottoman rule and making Bulgaria and
   Serbia independent. In early 1877, Russia intervened on behalf of
   Serbian and Russian volunteer forces when it went to war with the
   Ottoman Empire. Within one year, Russian troops were nearing
   Constantinople, and the Ottomans surrendered. Russia's nationalist
   diplomats and generals persuaded Alexander II to force the Ottomans to
   sign the Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878, creating an enlarged,
   independent Bulgaria that stretched into the southwestern Balkans. When
   Britain threatened to declare war over the terms of the Treaty of San
   Stefano, an exhausted Russia backed down. At the Congress of Berlin in
   July 1878, Russia agreed to the creation of a smaller Bulgaria. As a
   result, Russian nationalists were left with a legacy of bitterness
   against Austria-Hungary and Germany for failing to back Russia. The
   disappointment as a result of war stimulated revolutionary tensions in
   Russia.

Nihilism

   In the 1860s a movement known as Nihilism developed in Russia. For some
   time many Russian liberals had been dissatisfied by the empty
   discussions of the intelligentsia. The Nihilists questioned all old
   values, championed the independence of the individual, and shocked the
   Russian establishment.

   The Nihilists first attempted to convert the aristocracy to the cause
   of reform. Failing there, they turned to the peasants. Their "go to the
   people" campaign became known as the Narodnik movement.

   While the Narodnik movement was gaining momentum, the government
   quickly moved to extirpate it. In response to the growing reaction of
   the government, a radical branch of the Narodniks advocated and
   practiced terrorism. One after another, prominent officials were shot
   or killed by bombs. Finally, after several attempts, Alexander II was
   assassinated in 1881, on the very day he had approved a proposal to
   call a representative assembly to consider new reforms in addition to
   the abolition of serfdom designed to ameliorate revolutionary demands.

Autocracy and reaction under Alexander III

   Portrait of Tsar Alexander III (1886)
   Enlarge
   Portrait of Tsar Alexander III (1886)

   Unlike his father, the new tsar Alexander III (1881–1894) was
   throughout his reign a staunch reactionary who revived the maxim of
   "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Respect to the People" of Nicholas I. A
   committed Slavophile, Alexander III believed that Russia could be saved
   from chaos only by shutting itself off from the subversive influences
   of Western Europe. In his reign Russia concluded the union with
   republican France to contain the growing power of Germany, completed
   the conquest of Central Asia and exacted important territorial and
   commercial concessions from China.

   The tsar's most influential adviser was Konstantin Petrovich
   Pobedonostsev, tutor to Alexander III and his son Nicholas, and
   procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1895. He taught his royal
   pupils to fear freedom of speech and press and to hate democracy,
   constitutions, and the parliamentary system. Under Pobedonostsev,
   revolutionaries were hunted down and a policy of Russification was
   carried out throughout the empire.

Nicholas II and a new revolutionary movement

   Alexander was succeeded by his son Nicholas II (1894–1917). The
   Industrial Revolution, which began to exert a significant influence in
   Russia, was meanwhile creating forces that would finally overthrow the
   tsar. The liberal elements among the industrial capitalists and
   nobility believed in peaceful social reform and a constitutional
   monarchy, forming the Constitutional Democrats, or Kadets. Social
   revolutionaries combined the Narodnik tradition and advocated the
   distribution of land among those who actually worked it—the peasants.
   Another radical group was the Social Democrats, exponents of Marxism in
   Russia. Gathering their support from the radical intellectuals and the
   urban working class, they advocated complete social, economic and
   political revolution.

   In 1903 the party split into two wings: the radical Bolsheviks, led by
   Lenin, and the relatively moderate Mensheviks, led by Lenin's former
   friend Yuli Martov. The Mensheviks believed that Russian socialism
   would grow gradually and peacefully and that the tsar’s regime should
   be succeeded by a democratic republic in which the socialists would
   cooperate with the liberal bourgeois parties. The Bolsheviks, under
   Vladimir Lenin, advocated the formation of a small elite of
   professional revolutionists, subject to strong party discipline, to act
   as the vanguard of the proletariat in order to seize power by force.

   The disastrous performance of the Russian armed forces in the
   Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) was a major blow to the Tsarist regime
   and increased the potential for unrest. In January 1905, an incident
   known as " Bloody Sunday" occurred when Father Gapon led an enormous
   crowd to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to present a petition to
   the tsar. When the procession reached the palace, Cossacks opened fire
   on the crowd, killing hundreds. The Russian masses were so aroused over
   the massacre that a general strike was declared demanding a democratic
   republic. This marked the beginning of the Russian Revolution of 1905.
   Soviets (councils of workers) appeared in most cities to direct
   revolutionary activity. Russia was paralyzed, and the government was
   desperate.

   In October 1905, Nicholas reluctantly issued the famous October
   Manifesto, which conceded the creation of a national Duma (legislature)
   to be called without delay. The right to vote was extended and no law
   was to go into force without confirmation by the Duma. The moderate
   groups were satisfied; but the socialists rejected the concessions as
   insufficient and tried to organize new strikes. By the end of 1905,
   there was disunity among the reformers, and the tsar's position was
   strengthened for the time being.

Russian Revolution

   Vladimir Lenin speaking to Red Army troops before their departure to
   the Polish front.
   Enlarge
   Vladimir Lenin speaking to Red Army troops before their departure to
   the Polish front.

   Tsar Nicholas II and his subjects entered World War I with enthusiasm
   and patriotism, with the defense of Russia's fellow Orthodox Slavs, the
   Serbs, as the main battle cry. In August 1914, the Russian army entered
   Germany to support the French armies. However, the weaknesses of the
   Russian economy and the inefficiency and corruption in government were
   hidden only for a brief period under a cloak of fervent nationalism.
   Military reversals and the government's incompetence soon soured much
   of the population. German control of the Baltic Sea and German-Ottoman
   control of the Black Sea severed Russia from most of its foreign
   supplies and potential markets.

   By the middle of 1915 the impact of the war was demoralizing. Food and
   fuel were in short supply, casualties were staggering, and inflation
   was mounting. Strikes increased among low-paid factory workers, and the
   peasants, who wanted land reforms, were restless. Meanwhile, public
   distrust of the regime was deepened by reports that a semiliterate
   mystic, Grigory Rasputin, had great political influence within the
   government. His assassination in late 1916 ended the scandal but did
   not restore the autocracy's lost prestige.

   On March 3, 1917, a strike occurred in a factory in the capital
   Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg). Within a week nearly all the
   workers in the city were idle, and street fighting broke out. When the
   tsar dismissed the Duma and ordered strikers to return to work, his
   orders triggered the February Revolution.

   The Duma refused to disband, the strikers held mass meetings in
   defiance of the regime, and the army openly sided with the workers. A
   few days later a provisional government headed by Prince Lvov was named
   by the Duma. The following day the tsar abdicated. Meanwhile, the
   socialists in Petrograd had formed a soviet (council) of workers and
   soldiers' deputies to provide them with the power that they lacked in
   the Duma.

   In July, the head of the provisional government resigned and was
   succeeded by Alexander Kerensky, who was more progressive than his
   predecessor but not radical enough for the Bolsheviks. While Kerensky's
   government marked time, the Marxist soviet in Petrograd extended its
   organization throughout the country by setting up local soviets.
   Meanwhile, Kerensky made the fatal mistake of continuing to commit
   Russia to the war, a policy extremely unpopular with the masses.

   Lenin returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland, with the help of
   Germany, which hoped that widespread strife would cause Russia to
   withdraw from the war. A tumultuous reception by thousands of peasants,
   workers, and soldiers took place as Lenin's train rolled into the
   station. After many behind-the-scenes maneuvers, the soviets seized
   control of the government in November 1917, and drove Kerensky and his
   moderate provisional government into exile, in the events that would
   become known as the October Revolution.

   When the national assembly, which met in January 1918, refused to
   become a rubber-stamp of the Bolsheviks, it was dissolved by Lenin's
   troops. With the dissolution of the constituent assembly, all vestiges
   of bourgeois democracy were removed. With the handicap of the moderate
   opposition removed, Lenin was able to free his regime from the war
   problem by the harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) with Germany in
   which the Bolsheviks renounced all claims to the territories of
   Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and to the
   territories captured from the Ottoman Empire.

Russian Civil War

   A powerful group of counterrevolutionaries termed the White movement
   began to organize to topple the Bolsheviks. At the same time the Allied
   powers sent several expeditionary armies to Russia to support the
   anti-Communist forces. The Allies feared that the Bolsheviks were in a
   conspiracy with the Germans because of Brest-Litovsk; they also hoped
   that the White Russians might renew hostilities against Germany. In the
   fall of 1918 the Bolshevik regime was in a perilous position, opposed
   by Russia's former allies and internal enemies, as well as in sporadic
   conflict with short-lived nationalist republics in Belarus and Ukraine
   and anarchist forces.

   To counteract this emergency, a reign of terror was begun within Russia
   as the Red Army and the Cheka (the secret police) destroyed all enemies
   of the revolution. However lofty their goals were, the Bolsheviks did
   not have the consent of all elements of society and thus had to force
   their rule over Russia during the civil war. They swept away the
   tsarist secret police, so despised by Russians of all political
   persuasions, along with other tsarist institutions, but ensured the
   survival of their own regime by replacing it with a political police of
   considerably greater dimensions, both in the scope of its authority and
   in the severity of its methods. By 1920 all White resistance had been
   crushed, foreign armies evacuated, and Bolshevik governments
   established in Belarus, Ukraine, and the Caucasus, but at the cost of
   perpetuating Russia's long pattern of autocratic rule in new forms.

   As Russia was bogged down in civil war, the frontiers between Poland
   and Russia were not clearly defined by the postwar Treaty of Versailles
   and were further rendered chaotic by the civil war. The Polish-Soviet
   War (1919–1921), which ended with the defeat of the Red Army,
   determined the borders between Soviet Russia and Poland.

Soviet Union

   Lenin and Stalin
   Enlarge
   Lenin and Stalin

Creation of the Soviet Union

   The history of Russia between 1922 and 1991 is essentially the history
   of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or Soviet Union. This
   ideologically-based union, established in December 1922 by the leaders
   of the Russian Communist Party, was roughly coterminous with the
   Russian Empire. At that time, the new nation included four constituent
   republics: the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, Belarusian SSR, and the
   Transcaucasian SFSR.

   The constitution, adopted in 1924, established a federal system of
   government based on a succession of soviets set up in villages,
   factories, and cities in larger regions. This pyramid of soviets in
   each constituent republic culminated in the All-Union Congress of
   Soviets. But while it appeared that the congress exercised sovereign
   power, this body was actually governed by the Communist Party, which in
   turn was controlled by the Politburo from Moscow, the capital of the
   Soviet Union, just as it had been under the tsars before Peter the
   Great.

War communism and the New Economic Policy

   The period from the consolidation of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917
   until 1921 is known as the period of war communism. Banks, railroads,
   and shipping were nationalized and the money economy was restricted.
   Strong opposition soon developed. The peasants wanted cash payments for
   their products and resented having to surrender their surplus grain to
   the government as a part of its civil war policies. Confronted with
   peasant opposition, Lenin began a strategic retreat from war communism
   known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The peasants were freed from
   wholesale levies of grain and allowed to sell their surplus produce in
   the open market. Commerce was stimulated by permitting private retail
   trading. The state continued to be responsible for banking,
   transportation, heavy industry, and public utilities.

   Although the left opposition among the Communists criticized the rich
   peasants or kulaks who benefited from the NEP, the program proved
   highly beneficial and the economy revived. The NEP would later come
   under increasing opposition from within the party following Lenin's
   death in early 1924.

Changes in Russian society

   While the Russian economy was being transformed, the social life of the
   people underwent equally drastic changes. From the beginning of the
   revolution, the government attempted to weaken patriarchal domination
   of the family. Divorce no longer required court procedure; and to make
   women completely free of the responsibilities of childbearing, abortion
   was made legal as early as 1920. As a side effect, the emancipation of
   the women increased the labor market. Girls were encouraged to secure
   an education and pursue a career in the factory or the office. Communal
   nurseries were set up for the care of small children and efforts were
   made to shift the centre of people's social life from the home to
   educational and recreational groups, the soviet clubs.

   The regime abandoned the tsarist policy of discriminating against
   national minorities in favour of a policy of incorporating the more
   than two hundred minority groups into Soviet life. Another feature of
   the regime was the extension of medical services. Campaigns were
   carried out against typhus, cholera, and malaria; the number of doctors
   was increased as rapidly as facilities and training would permit; and
   infant mortality rates rapidly decreased while life expectancy rapidly
   increased.

   The government also promoted atheism and materialism, which formed the
   basis of Marxist theory. It opposed organized religion, especially in
   order to break the power of the Russian Orthodox Church, a former
   pillar of the old tsarist regime and a major barrier to social change.
   Many religious leaders were sent to internal exile camps. Members of
   the party were forbidden to attend religious services. The education
   system was separated from the Church. Religious teaching was prohibited
   except in the home and atheist instruction was stressed in the schools.

Industrialization and collectivization

   The years from 1929 to 1939 comprised a tumultuous decade in Russian
   history—a period of massive industrialization and internal struggles as
   Joseph Stalin established near total control over Russian society,
   wielding unrestrained power unknown to even the most ambitious tsars.
   Following Lenin's death Stalin wrestled to gain control of the Soviet
   Union with rival factions in the Politburo, especially Leon Trotsky's.
   By 1928, with the Trotskyists either exiled or rendered powerless,
   Stalin was ready to put a radical program of industrialization into
   action.

   In 1928 Stalin proposed the First Five-Year Plan. Abolishing the NEP,
   it was the first of a number of plans aimed at swift accumulation of
   capital resources though the buildup of heavy industry, the
   collectivization of agriculture, and the restricted manufacture of
   consumer goods and for the first time in history a government
   controlled all economic activity. While in the capitalist countries
   factories and mines were idle or running on reduced schedules during
   the Great Depression and millions were unemployed, the Soviet people
   worked many hours a day, six days a week, in a thoroughgoing attempt to
   revolutionize the Soviet economic structure.

   As a part of the plan, the government took control of agriculture
   through the state and collective farms (see collectivization in the
   USSR). By a decree of February 1930, about one million "kulaks" were
   forced off their land. Many peasants strongly opposed regimentation by
   the state, often slaughtering their herds when faced with the loss of
   their land. In some sections they revolted, and countless peasants
   deemed "kulaks" by the authorities were executed. The combination of
   bad weather, deficiencies of the hastily-established collective farms,
   and massive confiscation of grain precipitated a serious famine, and
   several million peasants died of starvation, mostly in Ukraine and
   parts of southwestern Russia. The deteriorating conditions in the
   countryside drove millions of desperate peasants to the rapidly growing
   cities, fuelling industrialization, and vastly increasing Russia's
   urban population in the space of just a few years.

   The plans received remarkable results in areas aside from agriculture.
   Russia, in many measures the poorest nation in Europe at the time of
   the Bolshevik Revolution, now industrialized at a phenomenal rate, far
   surpassing Germany's pace of industrialization in the nineteenth
   century and Japan's earlier in the twentieth century. Soviet
   authorities claimed in 1932 an increase of industrial output of 334%
   over 1914, and in 1937 a further increase of 180% over 1932. Moreover,
   the survival of Russia in the face of the impending Nazi onslaught was
   made possible in part through the capacity for production that was the
   outcome of industrialization.

   While the Five-Year Plans were forging ahead, Stalin was establishing
   his personal power. The secret police gathered in tens of thousands of
   Soviet citizens to face arrest, deportation, or execution. Of the six
   original members of the 1920 Politburo who survived Lenin, all were
   purged by Stalin. Old Bolsheviks who had been loyal comrades of Lenin,
   high officers in the Red Army, and directors of industry were
   liquidated in the Great Purges. Purges in other Soviet republics also
   helped centralize control in the USSR.

   Stalin's repressions led to the creation of a vast system of internal
   exile, of considerably greater dimensions than those set up in the past
   by the tsars. Draconian penalties were introduced and many citizens
   were prosecuted for fictitious crimes of sabotage and espionage. The
   labor provided by convicts working in the labor camps of the Gulag
   system became an important component of the industrialization effort,
   especially in Siberia. Perhaps around five percent of the population
   passed through the Gulag system.

The Soviet Union on the international stage

World War II

   Marking the Soviet Union's victory, a soldier raises the Soviet flag
   over the German Reichstag in the Nazi capital, Berlin
   Enlarge
   Marking the Soviet Union's victory, a soldier raises the Soviet flag
   over the German Reichstag in the Nazi capital, Berlin

   Until 1939 the USSR was in strong opposition to Nazi Germany,
   supporting the republicans of Spain who struggled against the fascist
   German and Italian troops during the Spanish Civil War. However, in
   1938 Germany and the other major European powers signed the Munich
   treaty following which Germany and Poland occupied Czech territories
   and the German plans for the further eastward expansion as well as the
   lack of the opposition to it from the Western powers became more
   apparent. The agreement increased fears in the Soviet Union of a coming
   German attack, which led the Soviet Union to respond with its own
   diplomatic maneuvers. In 1939 the Soviet Union signed the
   Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, dividing spheres of
   influence between themselves in Eastern Europe. On September, 17 1939,
   as German armies were within 150 kilometers of the Soviet border, the
   Soviet army invaded eastern portions of Poland largely populated by
   ethnic Ukrainians and Belorussians. The Soviets fought a war with
   Finland in a costly campaign known as the Winter War (1939-40). It was
   won by the Soviet Union, which gained part of the Karelian Isthmus. The
   fragile peace with Germany abruptly ended when the Axis forces led by
   Germany swept across the Soviet border on June 22, 1941. By November
   the German army had seized Ukraine, begun its siege of Leningrad, and
   threatened to capture the capital, Moscow, itself.

   However, the Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalingrad proved
   decisive, reversing the course of the entire war. After losing this
   battle the Germans lacked the strength to sustain their offensive
   operations against the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union held the
   initiative for the rest of the war. By the end of 1943, the Red Army
   had broken through the German siege of Leningrad and recaptured much of
   Ukraine. By the end of 1944, the front had moved beyond the 1939 Soviet
   frontiers into eastern Europe. With a decisive superiority in troops,
   Soviet forces drove into eastern Germany, capturing Berlin in May 1945.
   The war with Germany thus ended triumphantly for the Soviet Union.

   Although the Soviet Union was victorious in World War II, its economy
   had been devastated in the struggle and the war resulted in around 27
   million Soviet deaths. About seventy thousand settlements have been
   destroyed. Ten million Soviet citizens became victims of a repressive
   policy of Germans and their allies on an occupied territory. German
   Einsatzgruppen, along with Baltic and Ukrainian collaborators, were
   engaged in genocide of the Soviet Jewish population. The Romanian
   armies took part in genocide of Jews in occupied Odessa area. During
   occupation, Russia's Leningrad, now Saint-Petersburg, region lost
   around a quarter of its population (up to 1 million people, the largest
   death toll in a blockage in history). The occupied territories suffered
   from the ravages of German occupation, deportations of slave labour, as
   well as the Soviets' own scorched earth tactics in the retreat. Perhaps
   millions of Soviet citizens on occupied territories died because of
   famine and absence of elementary medical aid. Perhaps around 3.5
   million Soviet prisoners of war (of 5.5 million) died in German camps.

Cold War

   Collaboration among the major Allies had won the war and was supposed
   to serve as the basis for postwar reconstruction and security. However,
   the conflict between Soviet and U.S. national interests, known as the
   Cold War, came to dominate the international stage in the postwar
   period, assuming the public guise as a clash of ideologies.

   The Cold War emerged out of a conflict between Stalin and U.S.
   President Harry Truman over the future of Eastern Europe during the
   Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. Russia had suffered three
   devastating Western onslaughts in the previous 150 years during the
   Napoleonic Wars, the First World War, and the Second World War, and
   Stalin's goal was to establish a buffer zone of states between Germany
   and the Soviet Union. Truman charged that Stalin had betrayed the Yalta
   agreement. With Eastern Europe under Red Army occupation, Stalin was
   also biding his time, as his own atomic bomb project was steadily and
   secretly progressing.

   In April 1949 the United States sponsored the North Atlantic Treaty
   Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact in which most Western
   nations pledged to treat an armed attack against one nation as an
   assault on all. The Soviet Union established an Eastern counterpart to
   NATO in 1955, dubbed the Warsaw Pact. The division of Europe into
   Western and Soviet blocs later took on a more global character,
   especially after 1949, when the U.S. nuclear monopoly ended with the
   testing of a Soviet bomb and the Communist takeover in China.

   The foremost objectives of Soviet foreign policy were the maintenance
   and enhancement of national security and the maintenance of hegemony
   over Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union maintained its dominance over the
   Warsaw Pact through crushing the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, suppressing
   the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and supporting the
   suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s.

   As the Soviet Union continued to maintain tight control over its sphere
   of influence in Eastern Europe, the Cold War gave way to Détente and a
   more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world
   was no longer clearly split into two clearly opposed blocs in the
   1970s. Less powerful countries had more room to assert their
   independence, and the two superpowers were partially able to recognize
   their common interest in trying to check the further spread and
   proliferation of nuclear weapons in treaties such as SALT I, SALT II
   and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

   U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorated following the Soviet invasion of
   Afghanistan in 1979 and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, a staunch
   anti-communist, but improved as the Soviet bloc started to unravel in
   the late 1980s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia
   lost the superpower status that it had won in the Second World War.

The Khrushchev and Brezhnev years

   In the power struggle that erupted after Stalin's death in 1953, his
   closest followers lost out. Nikita Khrushchev solidified his position
   in a speech before the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in
   1956 detailing Stalin's atrocities and attacking him for promoting a
   personality cult. As details of his speech became public, Khrushchev
   accelerated a wide range of reforms. Downplaying Stalin's emphasis on
   heavy industry, he increased the supply of consumer goods and housing
   and stimulated agricultural production. The new policies improved the
   standard of living, although shortages of appliances, clothing, and
   other consumer durables would increase in later years. The judicial
   system, albeit still under a complete Communist party control, replaced
   police terror, and intellectuals had more freedom than before.

   On October 4, 1957 Soviet Union launched the first space satellite
   Sputnik. On April 12, 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human to
   travel into space in the Soviet spaceship Vostok 1.

   In 1964 Khrushchev was ousted by the Communist Party's Central
   Committee, charging him with a host of errors that included Soviet
   setbacks such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the deepening Sino-Soviet
   Split. After a brief period of collective leadership, a veteran
   bureaucrat, Leonid Brezhnev, took Khrushchev's place.

   Despite Khrushchev's tinkering with economic planning, the economic
   system remained dependent on central plans drawn up with no reference
   to market mechanisms. As a developed industrial country, the Soviet
   Union by the 1970s found it increasingly difficult to maintain the high
   rates of growth in the industrial sector that it had enjoyed in earlier
   years. Increasingly large investment and labor inputs were required for
   growth, but these inputs were becoming more difficult to obtain, partly
   because of the new emphasis on production of consumer goods. Although
   the goals of the five-year plans of the 1970s had been scaled down from
   previous plans, the targets remained largely unmet. Agricultural
   development continued to lag in the Brezhnev years.

   Although certain appliances and other goods became more accessible
   during the 1960s and 1970s, improvements in housing and food supply
   were not sufficient. The growing culture of consumerism and shortages
   of consumer goods, inherent in a non-market pricing system, encouraged
   pilferage of government property and the growth of the black market.
   But, in contrast to the revolutionary spirit that accompanied the birth
   of the Soviet Union, the prevailing mood of the Soviet leadership at
   the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was one of aversion to change.

Impending breakup of the Union

   Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly
   apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political
   structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that
   process. After the rapid succession of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin
   Chernenko, transitional figures with deep roots in Brezhnevite
   tradition, the relatively young and energetic Mikhail Gorbachev made
   significant changes in the economy and the party leadership. His policy
   of glasnost freed public access to information after decades of
   government repression. But Gorbachev failed to address the systemic
   crisis of the Soviet system; by 1991, when a plot by government
   insiders (see August coup) revealed the weakness of Gorbachev's
   political position, the end of the Soviet Union was in sight.

   At the end of World War I, the vast empires of the Ottomans, the
   Habsburgs, and the Romanovs collapsed, leaving Eastern Europe and
   Eurasia in turmoil amongst rivaling nations (with rivaling claims).
   Only the Russian empire was reconfigured, under Bolshevik leadership.
   Stalin led it through industrialization and the Nazi onslaught to
   become a superpower rivaling the United States. Yet the Soviet Union
   remained essentially an empire, held together by a party rather than
   tsar. The command economy proved progressively less able to cope with
   postindustrial technologies and with the demands of the new industrial
   middle class and well-educated bureaucracy forged under its tutelage.
   Gorbachev's Perestroika spelled deconstruction of the economy; and
   glasnost allowed ethnic and nationalist disaffection to reach the
   surface. When Gorbachev tried to reform the party, he weakened the
   bonds that held the state and union together.

The emergence of the Russian republic in the Soviet Union

   Because of the dominant position of Russians in the Soviet Union, most
   gave little thought to any distinction between Russia and the Soviet
   Union before the late 1980s. However, the fact that the Soviet regime
   was dominated by Russians did not mean that the Russian SFSR
   necessarily benefited from this arrangement. In the Soviet Union,
   Russia lacked even the paltry instruments of statehood that the other
   republics possessed, such as its own republic-level Communist Party
   branch, KGB, trade union council, Academy of Sciences, and the like.
   The reason of course is that if these organizations had had branches at
   the level of the Russian SFSR, they would have threatened the power of
   Union-level structures.

   In the late 1980s, Gorbachev underestimated the importance of the
   Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic emerging as a second power
   base to rival the Soviet Union. A Russian nationalist backlash against
   the Union came with many Russians arguing that Russia had long been
   subsidizing other republics, which tended to be poorer, with cheap oil,
   for instance. Demands were growing for Russia to have its own
   institutions, underdeveloped because of the equation of the Russian
   republic and the Soviet Union. As Russian nationalism became vocal in
   the late 1980s, a tension emerged between those who wanted to hold the
   Russian-dominated Union together and those who wanted to create a
   strong Russian state.

   This tension came to be personified in the bitter power struggle
   between Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Squeezed out of Union politics by
   Gorbachev in 1987, Yeltsin, an old-style party boss with no dissident
   background or contacts, needed an alternative platform to challenge
   Gorbachev. He established it by representing himself as both a Russian
   nationalist and a committed democrat. In a remarkable reversal of
   fortunes, he gained election as chairman of the Russian republic's new
   Supreme Soviet in May 1990, becoming in effect Russia's first directly
   elected president. The following month, he secured legislation giving
   Russian laws priority over Soviet laws and withholding two-thirds of
   the budget.

   The August 1991 coup by Communist hardliners was later foiled with the
   help from Yeltsin. The coup plotters had intended to save the party and
   the Union; instead, they hastened the demise of both.

   The Soviet Union officially broke up on December 25, 1991. The final
   act of the passage of power from the Soviet Union to Russia was the
   passing of the briefcases containing codes that would launch the Soviet
   nuclear arsenal from Gorbachev to Yeltsin.

Russian Federation

   By the mid-1990s Russia had a system of multiparty electoral politics.
   But it was harder to establish a representative government because of
   two structural problems—the struggle between president and parliament
   and the anarchic party system. Although Yeltsin had won plaudits abroad
   for casting himself as a democrat to weaken Gorbachev, his conception
   of the presidency was highly autocratic. He either acted as his own
   prime minister (until June 1992) or appointed men of his choice,
   regardless of parliament.

   Meanwhile, the profusion of small parties and their aversion to
   coherent alliances left the legislature chaotic. During 1993, Yeltsin's
   rift with the parliamentary leadership led to the September–October
   1993 constitutional crisis. The crisis climaxed on October 3, when
   Yeltsin chose a radical solution to settle his dispute with parliament:
   he called up tanks to shell the Russian White House, blasting out his
   opponents. As Yeltsin was taking the unconstitutional step of
   dissolving the legislature, Russia came the closest to serious civil
   conflict since the revolution of 1917. Yeltsin was then free to impose
   a constitution with strong presidential powers, which was approved by
   referendum in December 1993. But the December voting also saw sweeping
   gains for communists and nationalists, reflecting growing
   disenchantment with the costs of neoliberal economic reforms.

   Although Yeltsin came to power on a wave of optimism, he never
   recovered his popularity after endorsing Yegor Gaidar's " shock
   therapy" of ending Soviet-era price controls, drastic cuts in state
   spending, and an open foreign trade regime in early 1992 (see Russian
   economic reform in the 1990s). The reforms immediately devastated the
   living standards of much of the population, especially the groups that
   had enjoyed the benefits of Soviet-era state-controlled wages and
   prices, state subsidies, and welfare entitlement programs. In the 1990s
   Russia suffered an economic downturn more severe than the United States
   or Germany had undergone six decades earlier in the Great Depression.

   Economic reforms also consolidated a semi-criminal oligarchy with roots
   in the old Soviet system. Advised by Western governments, the World
   Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, Russia embarked on the
   largest and fastest privatization that the world had ever seen. By
   mid-decade, retail, trade, services, and small industry was in private
   hands. Most big enterprises were acquired by their old managers,
   engendering a new rich ( Russian oligarchs) in league with criminal
   mafias or Western investors. At the bottom, many workers were forced by
   inflation or unemployment into poverty, prostitution, or crime.
   Meanwhile, the central government had lost control of the localities,
   bureaucracy, and economic fiefdoms; tax revenues had collapsed. Still
   in deep depression by the mid-1990s, Russia's economy was hit further
   by the financial crash of 1998.

   Nevertheless, reversion to a socialist command economy seemed almost
   impossible, meeting widespread relief in the West. Russia's economy has
   also recovered somewhat since 1999, thanks to the rapid rise of the
   world price of oil and gas, by far Russia's largest export, but still
   remains far from Soviet-era output levels.

   After the 1998 financial crisis, Yeltsin was at the end of his
   political career. Just hours before the first day of 2000, Yeltsin made
   a surprise announcement of his resignation, leaving the government in
   the hands of the little-known Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former
   KGB official and head of the KGB's post-Soviet successor agency. In
   2000, the new acting president easily defeated his opponents in the
   presidential election on March 26, winning on the first ballot. In 2004
   he was reelected with 71% of the vote and his allies won legislative
   elections, but with international and domestic observers citing flaws.
   International observers were even more alarmed by late 2004 moves to
   further tighten the presidency's control over parliament, civil
   society, and regional officeholders.
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