Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Russia spans eleven time zones. No other country on Earth does. Its borders touch fourteen nations, its coastline is the world's fourth-longest at over 37,653 kilometres, and by landmass it covers the same surface area as the dwarf planet Pluto. Within this expanse live more than 140 million people, making Russia the most populous country in Europe and the ninth-most populous in the world. Sixteen of its urban areas each hold more than a million inhabitants. At the centre sits Moscow, the most populous metropolitan area in Europe and the country's capital. How did a settlement of East Slavs grow into the largest country in the world? What did its rulers call it before the word Russia even existed? And how did a nation that put the first human into orbit come to rank among the lowest in the world for democracy and press freedom? The answers run from a cave in the Altai Mountains to a war that began in 2022.

• 2. Before The Name

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  About 2 million years ago, representatives of Homo erectus migrated to the Taman Peninsula in southern Russia. Flint tools roughly 1.5 million years old turned up in the North Caucasus. In the Altai Mountains, Denisova Cave yielded the bones of an archaic human hybrid nicknamed Denny, half Neanderthal and half Denisovan, who lived some 90,000 years ago. Some of the last surviving Neanderthals lived here too, around 45,000 years ago, in Mezmaiskaya cave. The word Russia is far younger than these bones. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English name first appeared in the 14th century, borrowed from a Latin form used in the 11th century and frequently in 12th-century British sources. The deeper root, recorded in the Primary Chronicle, traces to the Rus people, described as a Swedish tribe. The Finnish word for Swedes, ruotsi, shares that same origin. Russian itself carries two distinct words. Russky refers to ethnic Russians, while rossiysky denotes citizens of any ethnicity. In 1721, Peter the Great proclaimed the Rossiyskaya imperiya, choosing the form that spoke of a multinational state rather than a single people.

• 3. Gathering The Lands

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  In 862, according to the Primary Chronicle, a Varangian named Rurik was elected ruler of Novgorod. His successor Oleg pushed south in 882 and seized Kiev, a city that had been paying tribute to the Khazars. The reigns of Vladimir the Great, from 980 to 1015, and his son Yaroslav the Wise, from 1019 to 1054, became Kiev's Golden Age. Vladimir adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, and Yaroslav gave the state its first written legal code, the Russkaya Pravda. The Mongol invasions of 1237 to 1240 ended Kievan Rus, sacking Kiev and killing much of the population. The invaders, later called Tatars, formed the Golden Horde, which ruled for two centuries. Out of that wreckage rose the Grand Principality of Moscow. When the seat of the metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church moved to Moscow in 1325, the city's influence grew. Prince Dmitry Donskoy led a united Russian army to a defeat of the Mongol-Tatars at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380. Ivan III, called the Great, threw off the Golden Horde, and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 he married Sophia Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI, taking the double-headed eagle as his coat-of-arms. In 1547, Ivan IV, known as the Terrible, was crowned the first tsar of all Russia.

• 4. Empire And Reform

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  In 1703, Peter the Great founded Saint Petersburg on the Baltic Sea, beginning with the Peter and Paul Fortress, and in 1712 the new city replaced Moscow as the capital. Peter ruled from 1682 to 1725 and defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War, which ran from 1700 to 1721, winning Russia access to the sea. Catherine the Great, who ruled from 1762 to 1796, presided over the Russian Age of Enlightenment and pushed the country's boundary to the Black Sea by annexing Crimea. In 1812, Napoleon's invasion reached Moscow before the bitter Russian winter and stubborn resistance destroyed his Grande Armée. Mikhail Kutuzov and Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly drove the French back across Europe and into Paris. Officers returning from the West carried liberal ideas home, fuelling the failed Decembrist revolt of 1825. Alexander II enacted the emancipation reform of 1861, freeing the serfs and spurring industrialisation. He was assassinated in 1881 by revolutionary terrorists. Through much of the 19th century, Russia and Britain manoeuvred over Afghanistan and Central Asia in a contest remembered as the Great Game.

• 5. Revolution And Soviet Power

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  In early 1917, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, ending the monarchy. He and his family were imprisoned and later executed during the Russian Civil War. The October Revolution, led by the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, handed full governing power to the soviets and created the world's first socialist state. The civil war that followed pitted the White movement against the Red Army, and by its end as many as 10 million had perished, mostly civilians. On the 30th of December 1922, Lenin and his aides formed the Soviet Union, joining the Russian SFSR with the Byelorussian, Transcaucasian, and Ukrainian republics. After Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, suppressed his rivals and became dictator by the 1930s. Stalin launched a command economy, forced industrialisation, and collectivised agriculture. Millions were sent to penal labour camps or deported to remote areas. The Soviet famine of 1932 to 1933 killed between 5.7 and 8.7 million people, with 3.3 million of them in the Russian SFSR. Out of this brutal upheaval, a largely agrarian country transformed into a major industrial power within a remarkably short span.

• 6. War And Superpower

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  On the 22nd of June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, opening the Eastern Front, the largest theatre of World War II. The German advance was halted at the Battle of Moscow, then broken at the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 to 1943 and the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943. The Siege of Leningrad sealed the city by land between 1941 and 1944, bringing starvation and more than a million deaths, yet it never surrendered. In May 1945, Soviet forces captured Berlin. The period from 1941 to 1945 is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, and Soviet civilian and military deaths reached about 26 to 27 million, roughly half of all World War II casualties. The Soviet Union emerged a superpower and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. In 1957 it launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, beginning the Space Age. On the 12th of April 1961, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft. The country also built the world's first nuclear power plant in 1954.

• 7. Collapse And The Putin Era

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  On the 25th of December 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved, and alongside contemporary Russia fourteen other post-Soviet states emerged. The collapse threw Russia into a deep depression. Reforms branded shock therapy privatised enterprises, often handing control to people with inside government connections and giving rise to the Russian oligarchs. The birth rate fell while the death rate climbed, and millions sank into poverty. In late 1993, a constitutional crisis between Boris Yeltsin and parliament ended in military force, with over 100 people killed, followed by a new constitution that gave the president enormous powers. On the 31st of December 1999, Yeltsin resigned and handed the post to his prime minister, Vladimir Putin. Putin won the 2000 election, defeated the insurgency in the Second Chechen War, and oversaw an economy lifted by high oil prices. His rule increased stability while transforming Russia into an authoritarian state. In 2008 Russian forces invaded Georgia and occupied Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin's policies are generally referred to as Putinism. The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Russia 150th out of 167 countries in its 2024 Democracy Index.

• 8. A War And A War Economy

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  On the 24th of February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the largest conventional war in Europe since World War II. This followed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support for an insurgency in the Donbas. Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe in March 2022 and suspended from the United Nations Human Rights Council the following month. After failing to capture Kyiv, Russian forces withdrew from the north, and in September 2022 the country proclaimed the annexation of four partially occupied Ukrainian regions, denounced internationally as illegal. By the end of 2025, Russian forces occupied about a fifth of Ukraine's territory. To sustain the fight, Russia completed a transition into a war economy, driven by high military expenditure, rising wages, and increased government spending. The country holds the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and the third-highest military expenditure, spending 109 billion dollars, about 5.9 percent of its GDP. Sanctions have left it heavily dependent on China, its largest trading partner. Whether that war economy can outlast the sanctions experts predict will weigh on Russia for years is the open question carried into its next chapter.