Russia History

Pre 20th Century

The founding of Novgorod in 862 by the Viking Rurik of Jutland is traditionally taken as the birth of what became the Russian state. Rurik's successor, Oleg, helped make Kiev the dominant regional power in the 10th and 11th centuries, until shifting trade routes rendered it a commercial backwater. The merchants of Novgorod eventually declared independence from Kiev and joined the emerging Hanseatic League, a federation of city-states that controlled Baltic and North Sea trade.

Centuries of prosperity were quashed in the 13th century by the marauding Mongolian Tatars, who held sway until 1480. The 16th century witnessed the ugly expansionist reign of Ivan the Terrible, whose incursions into the Volga region antagonised Poland and Sweden to Russia's later cost. When the 700-year Rurikid dynasty ended with the childless Fyodor, vengeful Swedish and Polish invaders each bloodily claimed the Russian throne. The issue was finally settled in 1613, with the 16-year-old Mikhail Romanov issuing in a dynasty that was to rule until 1917. Peter the Great, the dynasty's strongest ruler, celebrated vanquishing the Swedes by building a new capital in St Petersburg.

The 19th century began with a bang, thanks to Napoleon, and ended with the country in ominous turmoil. The long-suffering serfs were freed in 1861 and there was growing opposition to the repressive and autocratic tsarist rule. Peasants were angry at having to pay for land they regarded as their own, liberals advocated constitutional reform along western European lines and terrorists assassinated Alexander II in 1881. Many radicals fled, including the famous exile Vladimir Ulyanov, better known by his later nom de guerre, Lenin.

Modern

Under the young, weak Nicholas II, ignominious defeat in the war with Japan (1904-5) led to further unrest. The massacre of civilians on Bloody Sunday led to mass strikes and the murder of industrialists. Social Democrat activists formed workers' councils (soviets), and a general strike in October 1905 brought the country to its knees. The tsar finally buckled and permitted the formation of the country's first parliament (duma), only to disband it when he didn't like its leftist demands. Russia's disastrous performance in WWI fomented further unrest. Soldiers and police mutinied and a reconvened duma assumed government, manned by the commercial elite. Soviets of workers and soldiers were also formed, thus creating two alternative power bases. Both were unified in their demands for the abdication of the tsar, an action Nicholas was forced to undertake on 1 March 1917.

On 25 October a splinter group of Social Democrats (known as Bolsheviks and led by the exiled Lenin) seized control and empowered the soviets as the ruling councils. Headed by Lenin and supported by Trotsky and Stalin, the soviet government redistributed land to those who worked it, signed an armistice with Germany and created Trotsky's Red Army. In March 1918 the Bolshevik Party was renamed the Communist Party and the nation's capital was moved from Petrograd (St Petersburg's new, un-German-sounding name) to Moscow. Strongholds of those hostile to the communist regime had developed in the south and east of the country. Their collective name, the Whites, was their only source of cohesion. Three years of civil war resulted, with over a million citizens fleeing.

The economic consequences of the civil war were disastrous, culminating in the enormous famine of 1920-21. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established in 1922 and, following Lenin's death in January 1924, new lows in human brutality were reached by his successor, Josef Stalin, who introduced farm collectivisation, destroying the peasantry both as a class and as a way of life. Millions were executed or exiled to Siberian concentration camps.

Stalin was keen to avoid embroilment in WWII, which engulfed Europe in 1939, and the Ribbentrop-Molotov nonaggression pact was signed. The tables turned in 1941 when Hitler's invasion of Russia (Operation Barbarossa) issued in a bloody period of warfare that would eventually kill a sixth of the Soviet population. The battles for Leningrad (former Petrograd) and Stalingrad (today again known as Volgograd) were particularly protracted and obscene. One million Soviet troops died defending Stalingrad, the symbolically important namesake of their leader.

At the war's end, the Soviet's 'liberation' of Eastern Europe was soon recognised as a misnomer. Russia's extended control over much of Eastern Europe was the key to its emergence as one of the world's superpowers. Stalin re-established the old pattern of unpredictable purges and, as the Cold War developed, he established Western ideology as the country's new enemy. Following Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Krushchev emerged as leader and cautiously attempted to de-Stalinise the Party with his secret speech in 1956, which lambasted the cult of personality and sent shock waves around the world. Krushchev, long held to be an embarrassment to the Soviet nation due to his brash peasant ways, was eventually toppled in a coup lead by his long-time protégé, Leonid Brezhnev.

Despite increased repression, dissident movements sprang up. But change was on the way and Soviet communism's poor image was soon thoroughly overhauled by iconoclast Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev introduced political and economic reforms (perestroika) and called for greater openness (glasnost). In 1988 he held elections to transfer power from the Party to a new parliament. Reduced repression led to the eventual independence of the 15 Soviet republics, with the Baltic republics leading the way. This reduced sphere of influence and severe economic crisis caused Gorbachev domestic strife. A reactionary coup in August 1991 opened the way for his even more radical successor, Boris Yeltsin.

Post-Soviet Russia was marked by the misdealings of corrupt officials, financiers and out-and-out gangsters, as well as soaring rates of corruption, racketeering and murder. Despite the unpopularity of change, Russians narrowly voted back the indecisive, incoherent president Yeltsin in mid-1996 elections. The Yeltsin era was marked by the globalisation - by hook and by crook - of the Russian economy. The new democracy veered between the rise of ultra-nationalism and communist nostalgia. By 1999 things were looking even shakier - Yeltsin sacked his governments regularly, but the economy was getting steadily gloomier. In August 1998 the ruble was floated and immediately went into freefall.

Recent

Since 2000 Russia has been led by Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB officer who has steered a careful course between reform and centralisation, alarming the West with his control of the media and brutal clampdown on the independence movement in Chechnya. The Beslan school siege in September 2004 was the latest large-scale terrorist assault on Russia from Chechen separatists, whose activities have bedevilled Putin's presidency. Despite this, Putin remains an extremely popular president and Russia is in the grip of very healthy economic growth, even though there's clearly still a long way to go. Russia looks set to regain its position as a superpower through its vast gas and oil reserves rather than its nuclear arsenal, something most people would have laughed at just a few years ago. With WTO membership on the cards and Putin's hosting of the G8 summit in 2006, economically at least things are looking up, although any real reform of the lumbering bureaucracy remains a distant dream.