Short answers, pulled from the story.
The traditional start date of specifically Russian history is the establishment of the Rus' state in the north in the year 862, ruled by Varangians. According to the Calling of the Varangians, Rurik, Sineus and Truvor were invited in the 860s to restore order, and their successors extended authority to Kiev.
The region adopted Christianity in 988 by the official public baptism of Kiev's inhabitants by Prince Vladimir I. This began a synthesis of Byzantine, Slavic and Scandinavian cultures that defined Russian culture for the next thousand years.
Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible, was the first Russian ruler to officially crown himself Tsar, transforming the Grand Duchy into the Tsardom of Russia in 1547. He annexed the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia and created the first regular Russian army, the Streltsy.
Tsar Peter the Great renamed the state the Russian Empire in 1721, in the wake of the Great Northern War. He established Saint Petersburg, founded in 1703, as the new capital and introduced Western European culture to Russia.
Alexander II abolished Russian serfdom with the emancipation reform in 1861. At the time, in 1859, there were 23 million serfs out of a total population of 67 million, and he acted in anticipation of civil unrest that could foment a revolution.
The Time of Troubles ended with the coronation of Michael Romanov as the first Tsar of the Romanov dynasty in 1613, after an assembly of the land elected him to the throne in February. A volunteer army led by the merchant Kuzma Minin and prince Dmitry Pozharsky had expelled the Polish-Lithuanian forces from the capital.
After Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic renamed itself the Russian Federation and became the primary successor state. Russia retained its nuclear arsenal but lost its superpower status.