History of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  The history of Russia begins not with Russia at all, but with a bone. In a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, Russian archaeologists in 2008 uncovered a 40,000-year-old fragment from the fifth finger of a juvenile. DNA analysis revealed a previously unknown species of human. They named it the Denisova hominin. That same ground would later hold a female who died about 90,000 years ago. Her DNA showed she was a hybrid of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.

  This is a land where deep time and political ambition keep colliding. 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. From that founding flows a thousand-year question. How did a coordinated group of princely states along a river become the largest country in the world, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean?

  The answers run through invaded cities and crowned tsars. They run through a baptism in 988, a yoke broken at a river, and a window cut to the sea. They run through serfs, revolutions, and a union that, for nearly seventy years, swallowed Russian history whole. What follows is the story of how a people on the periphery became a power at the center, and what that ambition cost.

• 2. Rivers And Faith

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  Scandinavian Norsemen, known as Vikings in Western Europe and Varangians in the East, combined piracy and trade throughout 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 legendary Calling of the Varangians, recorded in chronicles such as the Primary Chronicle, tells of Rurik, Sineus and Truvor. They were invited in the 860s to restore order. Their successors moved south and extended their authority to Kiev, which had been dominated by the Khazars.

  Kievan Rus' controlled the trade route for furs, wax, and slaves between Scandinavia and the Byzantine Empire. The route ran along the Volkhov and Dnieper Rivers. By the end of the 10th century, the minority Norse military aristocracy had merged with the native Slavic population. That population absorbed Greek Christian influences during repeated campaigns to loot Tsargrad, the city the West called Constantinople. One such campaign claimed the life of Svyatoslav I, a druzhina leader renowned for crushing the power of the Khazars on the Volga.

  In 988, Prince Vladimir I publicly baptized the inhabitants of Kiev. The region adopted Christianity, and a Slavic variant of Eastern Orthodoxy took root. Some years later Yaroslav the Wise introduced the first code of laws, the Russkaya Pravda. By the 11th century, particularly during his reign, Kievan Rus' displayed an economy and achievements in architecture and literature superior to those then in the western part of the continent. Unlike European Christendom, the Russian language was little touched by Greek and Latin, because Church Slavonic was used directly in liturgy. From the onset, the Kievan princes followed the Byzantine example and kept the Church dependent on them.

• 3. The Tatar Yoke

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  In 1223, the disunited southern princes faced a Mongol raiding party at the Kalka River and were soundly defeated. The full invasion came soon after. In 1237 to 1238 the Mongols burnt down the city of Vladimir on the 4th of February 1238 and other major cities of northeast Russia. They routed the Russians at the Sit' River, then moved west into Poland and Hungary. Only the Novgorod Republic escaped occupation, continuing to flourish in the orbit of the Hanseatic League.

  The Mongols held Russia in sway from their western capital at Sarai, one of the largest cities of the medieval world. The princes had to pay tribute to the Golden Horde, commonly called Tatars. In return they received charters authorizing them to act as deputies to the khans. They were allowed considerable freedom to rule as they wished. The Russian Orthodox Church even experienced a spiritual revival. Under Mongol occupation, Muscovy developed its postal road network, census, fiscal system, and military organization.

  Prince Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod repelled the offensive of the Northern Crusades from the West. Yet on becoming Grand Prince he declared himself a vassal to the Golden Horde, lacking the strength to resist its power. Resistance among the Rus' did flare. A coalition of princes led by Dmitry Donskoy defeated the Mongol warlord Mamai at Kulikovo in 1380. Punishment followed fast. The forces of the new khan Tokhtamysh sacked Moscow in 1382. Mongol domination continued into the early 16th century, despite later claims by Muscovite bookmen that the indecisive standoff at the Ugra in 1480 had signified the end of the Tatar yoke.

• 4. Moscow Gathers The Lands

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  Daniil Aleksandrovich, the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, founded the principality of Moscow, known in English as Muscovy. Well-situated in the central river system of Russia and surrounded by protective forests and marshes, Moscow was at first only a vassal of Vladimir. Soon it absorbed its parent state. Its rulers cooperated with the Mongol overlords, who granted them the title of Grand Prince and made them agents for collecting the Tatar tribute. The principality's prestige rose further when the Metropolitan, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, fled from Kiev to Vladimir in 1299 and later established permanent headquarters in Moscow.

  Ivan III, the Great, laid the foundations for a Russian national state in the 15th century. He competed with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania for control of semi-independent principalities in the upper Dnieper and Oka basins. Through defections, border skirmishes, and a long war with Novgorod, he annexed Novgorod and Tver. The Grand Duchy of Moscow tripled in size under his rule. During his conflict with Pskov, a monk named Filofei composed a letter prophesying that Ivan's kingdom would be the Third Rome. Ivan's 1472 marriage to Byzantine Princess Sophia Palaiologina fed this idea of Moscow as the new seat of Orthodox Christianity.

  Under Ivan III the first central government bodies were created, the Prikaz. The Sudebnik was adopted, the first set of laws since the 11th century. The double-headed eagle was adopted as the coat of arms. Refusing further tribute, Ivan opened the way for the defeat of the declining Golden Horde, by then divided into several khanates. To guard his southern boundaries he sponsored the Great Abatis Belt and granted manors to nobles obliged to serve in the military. Biographer Fennell judged his reign militarily glorious and economically sound, yet also a period of cultural depression and spiritual barrenness, in which Ivan brought down the curtain between Russia and the west.

• 5. Tsars And Troubles

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  Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible, was the first Russian ruler to officially crown himself Tsar. His reign from 1547 to 1584 pushed autocratic power to a peak. He ruthlessly subordinated the nobles, exiling or executing many on the slightest provocation. Yet he is also seen as a farsighted statesman. He promulgated a new code of laws, the Sudebnik of 1550, established the first feudal representative body, the Zemsky Sobor, and created the first regular army, the Streltsy. He annexed the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia, and Russia emerged as a multiethnic and multiconfessional state.

  In the later part of his reign Ivan divided his realm in two. In the zone known as the oprichnina, his followers carried out bloody purges of the feudal aristocracy, culminating in the Massacre of Novgorod in 1570. This combined with military losses, epidemics, and poor harvests so weakened Russia that the Crimean Tatars burned down Moscow in 1571. The next year the Russians defeated the Crimean Tatar army at the Battle of Molodi, and Ivan abandoned the oprichnina.

  The death of Ivan's childless son Feodor led to a period of civil wars and foreign intervention known as the Time of Troubles. Extremely cold summers from 1601 to 1603 wrecked crops and brought famine. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth installed the impostor False Dmitriy I in 1605. A combined Russian-Swedish army was routed by Polish forces under hetman Stanislaw Zolkiewski at the Battle of Klushino. A volunteer army led by the merchant Kuzma Minin and prince Dmitry Pozharsky expelled the foreign forces from the capital. In February 1613, an assembly of the land elected Michael Romanov, the young son of Patriarch Filaret, to the throne. The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia until 1917.

• 6. Serfdom And The Cossack Revolt

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  Recovery of lost territories began in the mid-17th century with the Khmelnitsky Uprising in Ukraine against Polish rule. The Treaty of Pereyaslav granted Russian protection to the Cossacks of Left-bank Ukraine. The resulting Russo-Polish War ended with the Treaty of Andrusovo, where Poland accepted the loss of Left-bank Ukraine, Kiev and Smolensk. To the east, the conquest of Siberia pressed on. By the end of the 1640s the Russians reached the Pacific Ocean, and the explorer Semyon Dezhnev discovered the strait between Asia and America. Resistance from Qing China was settled by the Treaty of Nerchinsk, which delimited territories in the Amur region.

  The boyars cooperated with the first Romanovs, and in return the tsars allowed them to complete the enserfing of the peasants. Runaway peasants became state fugitives, and the landlords' power over those attached to their land became almost complete. The state and the nobles placed an overwhelming burden of taxation on the peasants, whose rate in the mid-17th century was 100 times greater than a century earlier. Riots were endemic, including the Salt Riot of 1648, the Copper Riot of 1662, and the Moscow Uprising of 1682.

  The greatest peasant uprising in 17th-century Europe erupted in 1667. The Cossack leader Stenka Razin led his followers up the Volga River, inciting peasant revolts and replacing local governments with Cossack rule. The tsar's army crushed his forces in 1670. A year later Stenka was captured and beheaded. Less than half a century later, the strains of military expeditions produced another revolt in Astrakhan.

• 7. Windows To The West

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  Peter the Great brought centralized autocracy into Russia and a place in the European state system. Born in 1672, he reformed the Russian army and created the Russian navy. His ambitions for a window to the sea led him in 1699 to a secret alliance with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Denmark against Sweden, beginning the Great Northern War. The war ended in 1721 when an exhausted Sweden sued for peace. Peter acquired four provinces south and east of the Gulf of Finland, securing his coveted access to the sea. In 1703 he had already founded Saint Petersburg, the new capital. In celebration of his conquests, the Russian Tsardom officially became the Russian Empire in 1721.

  Peter molded Russia into an absolutist state. He replaced the old boyar Duma with a Senate, created the Collegium in 1717, and in 1722 promulgated his famous Table of Ranks. He told the senate its mission was to collect taxes, and tax revenues tripled over his reign. He abolished the patriarchate and replaced it with the Holy Synod, led by a lay government official. He launched the Russo-Persian War of 1722 to 1723 to establish Russian influence in the Caucasus and Caspian region. Peter died in 1725, leaving an unsettled succession, but Russia had become a great power.

  Nearly forty years passed before a comparably ambitious ruler appeared. Catherine II, the Great, was a German princess who overthrew her husband in a coup in 1762. She supported the ideals of the Enlightenment and earned the status of an enlightened despot. She promulgated the Charter to the Gentry, reaffirming the nobility's rights and abolishing mandatory state service. A Cossack named Yemelyan Pugachev inspired a major peasant uprising in 1773 with the cry, Hang all the landlords. Catherine crushed it. She waged two wars against the Ottoman Empire, annexed Crimea in 1783, and incorporated territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Partitions of Poland.

• 8. Revolution And Its Heirs

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  Napoleon's invasion of Russia was a catastrophe for him and his 450,000 troops. One major battle was fought at Borodino, with very high casualties, but it proved indecisive. The Russians retreated, burning crops in a scorched earth policy. Between 85 and 90 percent of Napoleon's soldiers died from disease, cold, starvation, or ambush by peasant guerrillas. Of a population of around 43 million, Russia lost about 1.5 million in the year 1812. Alexander I pursued the retreating army into Europe and presided over the redrawing of the map at the Congress of Vienna.

  The retention of serfdom precluded economic progress. In 1859 there were 23 million serfs out of a total population of 67 million. Anticipating unrest that could foment revolution, Alexander II abolished serfdom with the emancipation reform in 1861. He reorganized the judicial system, promoted local self-government through the zemstvo, imposed universal military service, and in 1867 sold Alaska to the United States. He was assassinated by anarchists in 1881, on the very day he had approved a proposal to call a representative assembly.

  Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War increased the potential for unrest. In January 1905, Father Gapon led a crowd to the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, and Cossacks opened fire, killing hundreds. This Bloody Sunday began the Russian Revolution of 1905, and Nicholas II reluctantly issued the October Manifesto conceding a national Duma. The strains of World War I proved fatal. The combination of economic breakdown and discontent triggered the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the failed policies of the new coalition led to the October Revolution. In 1922, Soviet Russia signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR with the Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Transcaucasian republics. From 1922 to 1991, the history of Russia essentially became the history of the Soviet Union. By the mid-1980s, with Soviet structures growing acute in their weakness, Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on reforms that led to dissolution. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic renamed itself the Russian Federation and became the primary successor state, keeping its nuclear arsenal but losing its superpower status.