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The Millennium of Russia monument (unveiled on 8 September 1862) on a postage stamp dedicated to the 1140th anniversary of the Russian statehood in 2002
The history of Russia begins with the histories of the East Slavs. The traditional start-date of specifically Russian history is the establishment of the Rus' state in the north in 862 ruled by Vikings. Staraya Ladoga and Novgorod became the first major cities of the new union of immigrants from Scandinavia with the Slavs and Finno-Ugrians. In 882 Prince Oleg of Novgorod seized Kiev, thereby uniting the northern and southern lands of the Eastern Slavs under one authority. The state adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Orthodox Slavic culture for the next millennium. Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state due to the Mongol invasions in 1237–1240 along with the resulting deaths of about half the population of Rus'.
After the 13th century, Moscow became a cultural center. The territories of the Grand Duchy of Moscow became the Tsardom of Russia in 1547. In 1721 Tsar Peter the Great renamed his state as the Russian Empire,
hoping to associate it with historical and cultural achievements of
ancient Rus' – in contrast to his policies oriented towards Western
Europe. The state now extended from the eastern borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the Pacific Ocean. Peasant revolts were common, and all were fiercely suppressed. The Emperor Alexander II abolished Russian serfdom in 1861, but the peasants fared poorly and revolutionary pressures grew. In the following decades, reform efforts such as the Stolypin reforms of 1906–1914, the constitution of 1906, and the State Duma (1906–1917) attempted to open and liberalize the economy and political system, but the Emperors refused to relinquish autocratic rule and resisted sharing their power.
A combination of economic breakdown, war-weariness, and discontent with the autocratic system of government triggered revolution in Russia in 1917. The overthrow of the monarchy initially brought into office a coalition of liberals and moderate socialists, but their failed policies led to seizure of power by the communist Bolsheviks on 25 October 1917 (7 November New Style). Between 1922 and 1991 the history of Russia became essentially the history of the Soviet Union, effectively an ideologically-based state roughly conterminous with the Russian Empire before the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The approach to the building of socialism, however, varied over different periods in Soviet history: from the mixed economy and diverse society and culture of the 1920s through the command economy and repressions of the Joseph Stalin era to the "era of stagnation"
from the 1960s to the 1980s. From its first years, government in the
Soviet Union-based itself on the one-party rule of the Communists, as
the Bolsheviks called themselves, beginning in March 1918.
By the mid-1980s, with the weaknesses of Soviet economic and political structures becoming acute, Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on major reforms, which eventually led to the overthrow of the communist party and the breakup of the USSR, leaving Russia again on its own and marking the start of the history of post-Soviet Russia. The Russian Federation came into being in January 1992 as the legal successor to the USSR. Russia retained its nuclear arsenal but lost its superpower status. Scrapping the socialist central planning and state-ownership of property of the socialist era, new leaders, led by President Vladimir Putin (who first became President in 2000), took political and economic power after 2000 and engaged in an energetic foreign policy. Russia's 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula has led to economic sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union.
Prehistory
In 2006, 1.5-million-year-old Oldowan flint tools were discovered in the Dagestan Akusha region of the north Caucasus, demonstrating the presence of early humans in Russia from a very early time.
The discovery of some of the earliest evidence for the presence of
anatomically modern humans found anywhere in Europe was reported in 2007
from the deepest levels of the Kostenki archaeological site near the
Don River in Russia, which has been dated to at least 40,000 years ago. Arctic Russia was reached by 40,000 years ago. That Russia was also home to some of the last surviving Neanderthals was revealed by the discovery of the partial skeleton of a Neanderthal infant in Mezmaiskaya cave in Adygea, which was carbon dated to only 29,000 years ago. In 2008, Russian archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of Novosibirsk, working at the site of Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, uncovered a 40,000-year-old small bone fragment from the fifth finger of a juvenile hominin, which DNA analysis revealed to be a previously unknown species of human, which was named the Denisova hominin.
During the prehistoric eras the vast steppes of Southern Russia were home to tribes of nomadic pastoralists. In classical antiquity, the Pontic Steppe was known as Scythia. Remnants of these long gone steppe cultures were discovered in the course of the 20th century in such places as Ipatovo, Sintashta, Arkaim, and Pazyryk.
Antiquity
Stele with two Hellenistic soldiers of the Bosporan Kingdom; from Taman peninsula (Yubileynoe), southern Russia, 3rd quarter of the 4th century BC; marble, Pushkin Museum
In the later part of the 8th century BCE, Greek merchants brought classical civilization to the trade emporiums in Tanais and Phanagoria. Gelonus was described by Herodotus as a huge (Europe's biggest) earth- and wood-fortified grad inhabited around 500 BC by Heloni and Budini. The Bosporan Kingdom
was incorporated as part of the Roman province of Moesia Inferior from
63 to 68 AD, under Emperor Nero. At about the 2nd century AD Goths
migrated to the Black Sea, and in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, a
semi-legendary Gothic kingdom of Oium existed in Southern Russia until it was overrun by Huns. Between the 3rd and 6th centuries AD, the Bosporan Kingdom, a Hellenistic polity which succeeded the Greek colonies, was also overwhelmed by successive waves of nomadic invasions, led by warlike tribes which would often move on to Europe, as was the case with the Huns and Turkish Avars.
A Turkic people, the Khazars, ruled the lower Volga basin steppes between the Caspian and Black Seas through to 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 Caliphates. In the 8th century, the Khazars embraced Judaism.
Early history
Early East Slavs
A general map of the cultures in European Russia at the arrival of the Varangians and before the beginning of the Slavic colonization
Some of the ancestors of the modern Russians were the Slavic tribes, whose original home is thought by some scholars to have been the wooded areas of the Pripet Marshes. 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, 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' (882–1283)
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. According to the earliest Russian chronicle, a Varangian named Rurik was elected ruler (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. Oleg, Rurik's son Igor and Igor's son Sviatoslav subsequently subdued all local East Slavic tribes to Kievan rule, destroyed the Khazar khaganate and launched several military expeditions to Byzantium and Persia.
Thus, the first East Slavic state, 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.
By the end of the 10th century, the minority Norse military aristocracy had merged with the native Slavic population, which also absorbed Greek Christian influences in the course of the multiple campaigns to loot Tsargrad, or Constantinople. One such campaign claimed the life of the foremost Slavic druzhina leader, Svyatoslav I, who was renowned for having crushed the power of the Khazars on the Volga. At the time, the Byzantine Empire
was experiencing a major military and cultural revival; despite its
later decline, its culture would have a continuous influence on the
development of Russia in its formative centuries.
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Kievan Rus' after the Council of Liubech in 1097
Alexander Nevsky in the Golden Horde
Kievan Rus' is important for its 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, who followed the private conversion of his grandmother. Some years later the first code of laws, Russkaya Pravda, was introduced by Yaroslav the Wise. 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.
By the 11th century, particularly during the reign of Yaroslav the Wise,
Kievan Rus' displayed 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 because Church Slavonic was used directly in liturgy instead.
A nomadic Turkic people, the Kipchaks (also known as the Cumans), replaced the earlier Pechenegs
as the dominant force in the south steppe regions neighbouring to Rus'
at the end of the 11th century and founded a nomadic state in the
steppes along the Black Sea (Desht-e-Kipchak). Repelling their regular
attacks, especially in Kiev, which was just one day's ride from the
steppe, was a heavy burden for the southern areas of Rus'. The nomadic
incursions caused a massive influx of Slavs 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
in-fighting between members of the princely family that ruled it
collectively. 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, two regions on the periphery of Kiev, would establish the basis for the modern Russian nation.
Mongol invasion and occupation (1223–1480)
The invading Mongols accelerated the fragmentation of the Rus'. In 1223, the disunited southern princes faced a Mongol raiding party at the Kalka River and were soundly defeated. In 1237–1238 the Mongols burnt down the city of Vladimir (4 February 1238) and other major cities of northeast Russia, 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, Mongol
domination of the Russian-inhabited territories, along with demands of
tribute from Russian princes, continued until about 1480.
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.
The Mongols left their impact on the Russians in such areas as
military tactics and transportation. Under Mongol occupation, Russia
also developed its postal road network, census, fiscal system, and
military organization.
Grand Duchy of Moscow (1283–1547)
Rise of Moscow
Daniil Aleksandrovich, the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, founded the principality of Moscow (known as Muscovy in English),
which first cooperated with and ultimately expelled the Tatars from
Russia. 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, but soon it absorbed its parent state.
A major factor in the ascendancy of Moscow was the cooperation of
its rulers with the Mongol overlords, who granted them the title of
Grand Prince of Moscow and made them agents for collecting the Tatar
tribute from the Russian principalities. The principality's prestige was
further enhanced when it became the center 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 under the original title of Kiev Metropolitan.
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 Mongols were defeated, and although this hard-fought victory did not end Tatar rule of Russia, it did bring great fame to the Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy.
Moscow's leadership in Russia was now firmly based and by the middle of
the 14th century its territory had greatly expanded through purchase,
war, and marriage.
Ivan III, the Great
In the 15th century, the grand princes of Moscow continued to
consolidate Russian land to increase their population and wealth. The
most successful practitioner of this process was Ivan III, who laid the foundations for a Russian national state. Ivan competed with his powerful northwestern rival, the 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, the Grand Duchy of Moscow tripled in size under his rule. During his conflict with Pskov, a monk named Filofei (Philotheus of Pskov) composed a letter to Ivan III, with the prophecy that the latter's kingdom would 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, as did Ivan's 1472 marriage to Byzantine Princess Sophia Palaiologina.
The Great stand on the Ugra river (1480), ended Tatar/Mongol rule in Russia.
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 cavalry
based 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 Moscow and his descendants as unquestioned rulers with control over
military, judicial, and foreign affairs. Gradually, the Russian ruler
emerged as a powerful, autocratic ruler, a tsar. The first Russian ruler
to officially crown himself "Tsar" was Ivan IV.
Ivan III tripled the territory of his state, ended the dominance of the Golden Horde over the Rus', renovated the Moscow Kremlin,
and laid the foundations of the Russian state. Biographer Fennell
concludes that his reign was "militarily glorious and economically
sound," and especially points to his territorial annexations and his
centralized control over local rulers. However, Fennell, the leading
British specialist on Ivan III, argues that his reign was also "a period
of cultural depression and spiritual barrenness. Freedom was stamped
out within the Russian lands. By his bigoted anti-Catholicism Ivan
brought down the curtain between Russia and the west. For the sake of
territorial aggrandizement he deprived his country of the fruits of
Western learning and civilization."
Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721)
Ivan IV, the Terrible
Ivan IV was the Grand Prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547, then "Tsar of All the Russias" until his death in 1584.
The development of the Tsar's autocratic powers reached a peak during the reign of Ivan IV (1547–1584), known as "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 is often seen as a farsighted statesman who reformed Russia as he promulgated a new code of laws (Sudebnik of 1550), established the first Russian feudal representative body (Zemsky Sobor), curbed the influence of the clergy, and introduced local self-management in rural regions.
Although his long Livonian War for control of the Baltic coast and access to the sea trade ultimately proved a costly failure, Ivan managed to annex the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia. These conquests complicated the migration of aggressive nomadic hordes from Asia to Europe via the Volga and Urals. 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 in the Urals and recruited Russian Cossacks to colonise Siberia.
In the later part of his reign, Ivan divided his realm in two. In the zone known as the oprichnina,
Ivan's followers carried out a series of bloody purges of the feudal
aristocracy (whom he suspected of treachery after the betrayal of prince
Kurbsky), culminating in the Massacre of Novgorod in 1570. This combined with the military losses, epidemics, and poor harvests so weakened Russia that the Crimean Tatars were able to sack central Russian regions and burn down Moscow in 1571. In 1572 Ivan abandoned the oprichnina.
At the end of Ivan IV's reign the Polish–Lithuanian and Swedish
armies carried out a powerful intervention in Russia, devastating its
northern and northwest regions.
Time of Troubles
The Poles surrender the Moscow Kremlin to Prince Pozharsky in 1612.
The 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). Extremely cold summers (1601–1603) wrecked crops, which led to the Russian famine of 1601–1603 and increased the social disorganization. Boris Godunov's
(Борис Годунов) reign ended in chaos, civil war combined with foreign
intrusion, devastation of many cities and depopulation of the rural
regions. The country rocked by internal chaos also attracted several
waves of interventions by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
During the Polish–Muscovite War (1605–1618), Polish–Lithuanian forces reached Moscow and installed the impostor False Dmitriy I in 1605, then supported False Dmitry II in 1607. The decisive moment came when a combined Russian-Swedish army was routed by the Polish forces under hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski at the Battle of Klushino on 4 July [O.S. 24 June] 1610. As the result of the battle, the Seven Boyars, a group of Russian nobles, deposed the tsar Vasily Shuysky on 27 July [O.S. 17 July] 1610, and recognized the Polish prince Władysław IV Vasa as the Tsar of Russia on 6 September [O.S. 27 August] 1610. The Poles entered Moscow on 21 September [O.S. 11 September] 1610. Moscow revolted but riots there were brutally suppressed and the city was set on fire.
The crisis provoked a patriotic national uprising against the invasion, both in 1611 and 1612. Finally, a volunteer army, led by the merchant Kuzma Minin and prince Dmitry Pozharsky, expelled the foreign forces from the capital on 4 November [O.S. 22 October] 1612.
The Russian statehood 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. However, the "Time of Troubles" provoked by the dynastic crisis resulted in the loss of much territory to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Russo-Polish war, as well as to the Swedish Empire in the Ingrian War.
Accession of the Romanovs and early rule
Election of 16-year-old Mikhail Romanov, the first Tsar of the Romanov dynasty
In February 1613, with the chaos ended and the Poles expelled from Moscow, a national assembly, composed of representatives from fifty cities and even some peasants, elected Michael Romanov, the young son of Patriarch Filaret, to the throne. 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
Russia 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 began in the mid-17th century, when the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–57) in Ukraine against Polish rule brought about the Treaty of Pereyaslav, concluded between Russia and the Ukrainian Cossacks. According to the treaty, Russia granted protection to the Cossacks state in Left-bank Ukraine, formerly under Polish control. This triggered a prolonged Russo-Polish War (1654-1667), which ended with the Treaty of Andrusovo, where Poland accepted the loss of Left-bank Ukraine, Kiev and Smolensk.
Rather than risk their estates in more civil war, the 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.
Stenka Razin Sailing in the Caspian
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, and the power of the landlords
over the peasants "attached" to their land had become almost complete.
Together the state and the nobles placed an 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.
Riots amongst peasants and citizens of Moscow at this time were endemic, and included the Salt Riot (1648), Copper Riot (1662), and the Moscow Uprising (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.
Russian Empire (1721–1917)
Population
Much of Russia's expansion occurred in the 17th century, culminating in the first Russian colonisation of the Pacific in the mid-17th century, the Russo-Polish War (1654–67) that incorporated left-bank Ukraine, and the Russian conquest of Siberia.
Poland was divided in the 1790–1815 era, with much of the land and
population going to Russia. Most of the 19th century growth came from
adding territory in Asia, south of Siberia.
| Year | Population of Russia (millions) | Notes |
| 1720 | 15.5 | includes new Baltic & Polish territories |
| 1795 | 37.6 | includes part of Poland |
| 1812 | 42.8 | includes Finland |
| 1816 | 73.0 | includes Congress Poland, Bessarabia |
| 1914 | 170.0 | includes new Asian territories |
| source: Brian Catchpole, A Map History of Russia (1974) p 25. |
Peter the Great
Peter I of Russia
Peter the Great (1672–1725) brought autocracy into Russia and played a major role in bringing his country into the European state system. Russia had now become the largest country in the world, stretching from the Baltic Sea
to the Pacific Ocean. The vast majority of the land was unoccupied, and
travel was slow. 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, a population of only 14 million was stretched across this vast
landscape. With a short growing season grain yields trailed behind
those in the West and potato farming was not yet widespread. As a
result, the great majority of the population workforce was occupied with
agriculture. Russia remained isolated from the sea trade and its
internal trade, communication and manufacturing were seasonally
dependent.
Russian expansion in Eurasia between 1533–1896
Map of the city of Orenburg, which was founded in 1743 on the boundary of Europe and Asia
Peter's first military efforts were directed against the Ottoman Turks. His aim was to establish a Russian foothold on the Black Sea by taking the town of Azov. His attention then turned to the north. Peter still lacked a secure northern seaport except at Archangel on the White Sea,
whose harbor 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,
in 1703, he had already founded the city that was to become Russia's
new capital, Saint Petersburg,
as a "window opened upon Europe" to replace Moscow, long Russia's
cultural center. Russian intervention in the Commonwealth marked, with
the Silent Sejm,
the beginning of a 200-year domination of that region by the Russian
Empire. In celebration of his conquests, Peter assumed the title of
emperor, and the Russian Tsardom officially became the Russian Empire in 1721.
Peter the Great leading the Russian army in the Battle of Poltava
Peter reorganized his government based 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.
Administrative Collegia
(ministries) were established in St. Petersburg, to replace the old
governmental departments. In 1722 Peter promulgated his famous Table of ranks.
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. Peter continued and intensified his
predecessors' requirement of state service for all nobles.
By this same time, the once powerful Persian Safavid Empire to the south was heavily declining. Taking advantage of the profitable situation, Peter launched the Russo-Persian War (1722-1723),
known as "The Persian Expedition of Peter the Great" by Russian
histographers, in order to be the first Russian emperor to establish
Russian influence in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea
region. After considerable success and the capture of many provinces
and cities in the Caucasus and northern mainland Persia, the Safavids
were forced to hand over the territories to Russia. However, by twelve
years later, all the territories were ceded back to Persia, which was
now led by the charismatic military genius Nader Shah, as part of the Treaty of Resht and Treaty of Ganja and the Russo-Persian alliance against the Ottoman Empire, the common neighbouring rivalling enemy.
Peter the Great died in 1725, leaving an unsettled succession,
but Russia had become a great power by the end of his reign. Peter I was
succeeded by his second wife, Catherine I (1725–1727), who was merely a figurehead for a powerful group of high officials, then by his minor grandson, Peter II (1727–1730), then by his niece, Anna (1730–1740), daughter of Tsar Ivan V. The heir to Anna was soon deposed in a coup and Elizabeth, daughter of Peter I, ruled from 1741 to 1762. During her reign, Russia took part in the Seven Years' War.
Catherine the Great
Nearly forty years were to pass before a comparably ambitious ruler appeared on the Russian throne. Catherine II,
"the Great" (r. 1762–1796), was a German princess who married the
German heir to the Russian crown. He took weak positions, and Catherine
overthrew him in a coup in 1762, becoming queen regnant. Catherine enthusiastically supported the ideals of The Enlightenment, thus earning the status of an enlightened despot
She patronized the arts, science and learning. She contributed to the
resurgence of the Russian nobility that began after the death of Peter
the Great. Catherine promulgated the Charter to the Gentry
reaffirming rights and freedoms of the Russian nobility and abolishing
mandatory state service. She seized control of all the church lands,
drastically reduced the size of the monasteries, and put the surviving
clergy on a tight budget.
Catherine spent heavily to promote an expansive foreign policy. She
extended Russian political control over the Polish–Lithuanian
Commonwealth with actions, including the support of the Targowica Confederation.
The cost of her campaigns, on top of the oppressive social system that
required serfs to spend almost all of their time laboring on the land of
their lords, provoked a major peasant uprising in 1773. Inspired by a
Cossack named Pugachev,
with the emphatic cry of "Hang all the landlords!", the rebels
threatened to take Moscow until Catherine crushed the rebellion. Like
the other enlightened despots of Europe, Catherine made certain of her
own power and formed an alliance with the nobility.
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 territories of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth,
where after a century of Russian rule non-Catholic, mainly Orthodox
population prevailed during the Partitions of Poland, pushing the Russian frontier westward into Central Europe. In accordance to the treaty
Russia had signed with the Georgians to protect them against any new
invasion of their Persian suzerains and further political aspirations,
Catherine waged a new war against Persia in 1796 after they had again invaded Georgia and established rule over it about a year prior, and had expelled the newly established Russian garrisons in the Caucasus.
Ruling the Empire (1725–1825)
Innovative
tsars such as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great brought in
Western experts, scientists, philosophers, and engineers. Powerful
Russians resented their privileged positions and alien ideas. The
backlash was especially severe after the Napoleonic wars. It produced a
powerful anti-western campaign that "led to a wholesale purge of Western
specialists and their Russian followers in universities, schools, and
government service."
State budget
Jean-Baptiste Landé founded Russian ballet.
Russia was in a continuous state of financial crisis. While revenue
rose from 9 million rubles in 1724 to 40 million in 1794, expenses grew
more rapidly, reaching 49 million in 1794. The budget was allocated 46
percent to the military, 20 percent to government economic activities,
12 percent to administration, and nine percent for the Imperial Court in
St. Petersburg. The deficit required borrowing, primarily from
Amsterdam; five percent of the budget was allocated to debt payments.
Paper money was issued to pay for expensive wars, thus causing
inflation. For its spending, Russia obtained a large and glorious army, a
very large and complex bureaucracy, and a splendid court that rivaled
Paris and London. However, the government was living far beyond its
means, and 18th-century Russia remained "a poor, backward,
overwhelmingly agricultural, and illiterate country."
Alexander I
By the time of her death in 1796, Catherine's expansionist policy had made Russia into a major European power. Alexander I continued this policy, wresting Finland from the weakened kingdom of Sweden in 1809 and Bessarabia from the Ottomans in 1812.
The Battle of Ganja during the Russo-Persian War of 1804–1813
After Russian armies liberated allied Georgia from Persian occupation in 1802, they clashed with Persia over control and consolidation over Georgia, as well as the Iranian territories that comprise modern-day Azerbaijan and Dagestan. They also became involved in the Caucasian War against the Caucasian Imamate. In 1813, the war with Persia concluded with a Russian victory, forcing Qajar Iran to cede swaths of its territories in the Caucasus to Russia, which drastically increased its territory in the region. To the south-west, Russia attempted to expand at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, using Georgia at its base for the Caucasus and Anatolian front.
In European policy, Alexander I switched Russia back and forth
four times in 1804–1812 from neutral peacemaker to anti-Napoleon to an
ally of Napoleon, winding up in 1812 as Napoleon's enemy. In 1805, he
joined Britain in the War of the Third Coalition against Napoleon, but after the massive defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz he switched and formed an alliance with Napoleon by the Treaty of Tilsit (1807) and joined Napoleon's Continental System. He fought a small-scale naval war against Britain, 1807–12. He and Napoleon could never agree, especially about Poland, and the alliance collapsed by 1810.
Furthermore, Russia's economy had been hurt by Napoleon's
Continental System, which cut off trade with Britain. As Esdaile notes,
"Implicit in the idea of a Russian Poland was, of course, a war against
Napoleon."
Schroeder says Poland was the root cause of the conflict but Russia's
refusal to support the Continental System was also a factor.
Napoleon's retreat from Moscow
The entry of Russian troops into Paris in 1814, headed by the Emperor Alexander I
The invasion of Russia was a catastrophe for Napoleon and his 450,000 invasion troops. One major battle was fought at Borodino;
casualties were very high but it was indecisive and Napoleon was unable
to engage and defeat the Russian armies. He attempted to force the Tsar
to terms by capturing Moscow at the onset of winter, even though the
French Army had already lost most of its men. The expectation proved
futile. The Russians retreated, burning crops and food supplies in a
scorched earth policy that multiplied Napoleon's logistic problems.
Unprepared for winter warfare, 85%–90% of Napoleon's soldiers died from
disease, cold, starvation or by ambush by peasant guerrilla fighters. As
Napoleon's forces retreated, Russian troops pursued them into Central
and Western Europe and finally captured Paris. Out of a total population of around 43 million people,
Russia lost about 1.5 million in the year 1812; of these about 250,000
to 300,000 were soldiers and the rest peasants and serfs.
After the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Alexander became
known as the 'savior of Europe.' He presided over the redrawing of the
map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), which made him the king of Congress Poland. He formed the Holy Alliance
with Austria and Prussia, to suppress revolutionary movements in Europe
that he saw as immoral threats to legitimate Christian monarchs. He
helped Austria's Klemens von Metternich in suppressing all national and liberal movements.
Although the Russian Empire would play a leading political role
as late as 1848, its retention of serfdom precluded economic progress of
any significant degree. As West European economic growth accelerated
during the Industrial Revolution, sea trade and colonialism which had
begun in the second half of the 18th century, Russia began to lag ever
farther behind, undermining its ability to field strong armies.
Nicholas I and the Decembrist Revolt
The Decembrists at the Senate Square
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 was willing to discuss
constitutional reforms, and though a few were introduced, no
thoroughgoing changes were attempted.
The tsar was succeeded 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 liberal reforms and champion the reactionary doctrine "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality".
In 1826–1828 Russia fought another war against Persia.
Russia lost almost all of its recently consolidated territories during
the first year but gained them back and won the war on highly favourable
terms. At the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay, Russia gained Armenia, Nakhchivan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan, and Iğdır. In the 1828–1829 Russo-Turkish War Russia invaded northeastern Anatolia and occupied the strategic Ottoman towns of Erzurum and Gumushane and, posing as protector and saviour of the Greek Orthodox population, received extensive support from the region's Pontic Greeks.
Following a brief occupation, the Russian imperial army withdrew back
into Georgia. By the 1830s, Russia had conquered all Persian territories
and major Ottoman territories in the Caucasus.
In 1831 Nicholas crushed the November Uprising
in Poland. The Russian autocracy gave Polish artisans and gentry reason
to rebel in 1863 by assailing the national core values of language,
religion, and culture. The resulting January Uprising
was a massive Polish revolt, which also was crushed. France, Britain
and Austria tried to intervene in the crisis but were unable to do so.
The Russian patriotic press used the Polish uprising to unify the
Russian nation, claiming it was Russia's God-given mission to save
Poland and the world.
Poland was punished by losing its distinctive political and judicial
rights, with Russianization imposed on its schools and courts.
Russian Army
Monument to Nicholas I on St. Isaac's Square, Saint Petersburg
Tsar Nicholas I
(reigned 1825–1855) lavished attention on his very large army; with a
population of 60–70 million people, the army included a million men.
They had outdated equipment and tactics, but the tsar, who dressed like a
soldier and surrounded himself with officers, gloried in the victory
over Napoleon in 1812 and took enormous pride in its smartness on
parade. The cavalry horses, for example, were only trained in parade
formations, and did poorly in battle. The glitter and braid masked
profound weaknesses that he did not see. He put generals in charge of
most of his civilian agencies regardless of their qualifications. An
agnostic who won fame in cavalry charges was made supervisor of Church
affairs. The Army became the vehicle of upward social mobility for noble
youths from non-Russian areas, such as Poland, the Baltic, Finland and
Georgia. On the other hand, many miscreants, petty criminals and
undesirables were punished by local officials by enlisting them for life
in the Army. The conscription system was highly unpopular with people,
as was the practice of forcing peasants to house the soldiers for six
months of the year. Curtiss finds that "The pedantry of Nicholas'
military system, which stressed unthinking obedience and parade ground
evolutions rather than combat training, produced ineffective commanders
in time of war." His commanders in the Crimean War were old and
incompetent, and indeed so were his muskets as the colonels sold the
best equipment and the best food.
Finally the Crimean War
at the end of his reign demonstrated to the world what no one had
previously realized: Russia was militarily weak, technologically
backward, and administratively incompetent. Despite his grand ambitions
toward the south and Ottoman Empire, Russia had not built its railroad
network in that direction, and communications were bad. The bureaucracy
was riddled with graft, corruption and inefficiency and was unprepared
for war. The Navy was weak and technologically backward; the Army,
although very large, was good only for parades, suffered from colonels
who pocketed their men's pay, poor morale, and was even more out of
touch with the latest technology as developed by Britain and France. As
Fuller notes, "Russia had been beaten on the Crimean peninsula, and the
military feared that it would inevitably be beaten again unless steps
were taken to surmount its military weakness."
Slavophiles and Westernizers
As
Western Europe modernized, after 1840 the issue for Russia became one
of direction. Westernizers favored imitating Western 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 and preferred the collectivism of the medieval Russian mir, or village community, to the individualism of the West.
Westernizers
Pyotr Chaadayev, 1794–1856, philosopher
Westernizers formed an intellectual movement that deplored the
backwardness of Russian culture, and looked to western Europe for
intellectual leadership. They were opposed by Slavophiles who denounced the West as too materialistic and instead promoted the spiritual depth of Russian traditionalism. A forerunner of the movement was Pyotr Chaadayev (1794–1856). He exposed the cultural isolation of Russia, from the perspective of Western Europe, in his Philosophical Letters
of 1831. He cast doubt on the greatness of the Russian past, and
ridiculed Orthodoxy for failing to provide a sound spiritual basis for
the Russian mind. He called on Russia to emulate Western Europe,
especially in rational and logical thought, its progressive spirit, its
leadership in science, and indeed its leadership on the path to freedom. Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848), and Alexander Herzen (1812–1870) were prominent Westernizers.
The Crimean War
Since
the war against Napoleon, Russia had become deeply involved in the
affairs of Europe, as part of the "Holy Alliance." The Holy Alliance was
formed to serve as the "policeman of Europe." However, to be the
policeman of Europe and maintain the alliance required large armies.
Prussia, Austria, Britain and France (the other members of the alliance)
lacked large armies and needed Russia to supply the required numbers,
which fit the philosophy of Nicholas I. When the Revolutions of 1848
swept Europe, however, Russia was quiet. The Tsar sent his army into
Hungary in 1849 at the request of the Austrian Empire and broke the
revolt there, while preventing its spread to Russian Poland. The Tsar
cracked down on any signs of internal unrest.
Russia expected that in exchange for supplying the troops to be
the policeman of Europe, it should have a free hand in dealing with the
decaying Ottoman Empire—the "sick man of Europe." In 1853 Russia invaded
Ottoman-controlled areas leading to the Crimean War.
Britain and France came to the rescue of the Ottomans. After a
gruelling war fought largely in Crimea, with very high death rates from
disease, the allies won.
Historian Orlando Figes points to the long-term damage Russia suffered:
- The demilitarization of the Black Sea was a major blow to Russia, which was no longer able to protect its vulnerable southern coastal frontier against the British or any other fleet.... The destruction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Sevastopol and other naval docks was a humiliation. No compulsory disarmament had ever been imposed on a great power previously.... The Allies did not really think that they were dealing with a European power in Russia. They regarded Russia as a semi-Asiatic state....In Russia itself, the Crimean defeat discredited the armed services and highlighted the need to modernize the countries defences, not just in the strictly military sense, but also through the building of railways, industrialization, sound finances and so on....The image many Russians had built up of their country – the biggest, richest and most powerful in the world – had suddenly been shattered. Russia's backwardness had been exposed....The Crimean disaster had exposed the shortcomings of every institution in Russia – not just the corruption and incompetence of the military command, the technological backwardness of the army and navy, or the inadequate roads and lack of railways the accounted for the chronic problems of supply, but the poor condition and illiteracy of the serfs who made up the armed forces, the inability of the serf economy to sustain a state of war against industrial powers, and the failures of autocracy itself.
As Fuller notes, "Russia had been beaten on the Crimean peninsula,
and the military feared that it would inevitably be beaten again unless
steps were taken to surmount its military weakness."
Alexander II and the abolition of serfdom
The manifesto of the abolition of serfdom is being read to people.
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 weakness of Tsar Nicholas' regime.
When Alexander II came to the throne in 1855, desire for reform was widespread. The most pressing problem confronting the Government was serfdom. In 1859, there were 23 million serfs (out of a total population of 67.1 Million).
In anticipation of civil unrest that could ultimately foment a
revolution, Alexander II chose to preemptively abolish serfdom with the emancipation reform
in 1861. Emancipation brought a supply of free labor to the cities,
stimulated industry, and the middle class grew in number and influence.
The freed peasants had to buy land, allotted to them, from the
landowners with the state assistance. The Government issued special
bonds to the landowners for the land that they had lost, and collected a
special tax from the peasants, called redemption payments, at a rate of
5% of the total cost of allotted land yearly. 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.
The Russian and Bulgarian defence of Shipka Pass against Turkish troops was crucial for the independence of Bulgaria.
Alexander was the most successful Russian reformer since Peter the Great, and was responsible for numerous reforms besides abolishing serfdom. He reorganized the judicial system,
setting up elected local judges, abolishing capital punishment,
promoting local self-government through the zemstvo system, imposing
universal military service, ending some of the privileges of the
nobility, and promoting the universities. In foreign policy, he sold Alaska
to the United States in 1867, fearing the remote colony would fall into
British hands if there was another war. He modernized the military
command system. He sought peace, and moved away from bellicose France
when Napoleon III fell. He joined with Germany and Austria in the League
of the Three Emperors that stabilized the European situation. The
Russian Empire expanded in Siberia and in the Caucasus and made gains at
the expense of China. Faced with an uprising in Poland in 1863, he
stripped that land of its separate Constitution and incorporated it
directly into Russia. To counter the rise of a revolutionary and
anarchistic movements, he sent thousands of dissidents into exile in
Siberia and was proposing additional parliamentary reforms when he was
assassinated in 1881.
In the late 1870s Russia and the Ottoman Empire again clashed in the Balkans. The Russo-Turkish War
was popular among the Russian people, who supported the independence of
their fellow Orthodox Slavs, the Serbs and the Bulgarians. However, the
war increased tension with Austria-Hungary, which also had ambitions in
the region. The tsar was disappointed by the results of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, but abided by the agreement. During this period Russia expanded its empire into Central Asia, which was rich in raw materials, conquering the khanates of Kokand, Bokhara, and Khiva, as well as the Trans-Caspian region.
Nihilist movement
Russian Pervomartovtsy are given the last rites before their execution.
In the 1860s a movement known as Nihilism developed in Russia. A term originally coined by Ivan Turgenev in his 1862 novel Fathers and Sons,
Nihilists favoured the destruction of human institutions and laws,
based on the assumption that such institutions and laws are artificial
and corrupt. At its core, Russian nihilism was characterized by the
belief that the world lacks comprehensible meaning, objective truth, or
value. For some time many Russian liberals had been dissatisfied by what
they regarded as the empty discussions of the intelligentsia. The Nihilists questioned all old values and shocked the Russian establishment.
They moved beyond being purely philosophical to becoming major
political forces after becoming involved in the cause of reform. Their
path was facilitated by the previous actions of the Decembrists, who
revolted in 1825, and the financial and political hardship caused by the
Crimean War, which caused many Russians to lose faith in political
institutions.
The Nihilists first attempted to convert the aristocracy to the cause of reform. Failing there, they turned to the peasants. Their campaign, which targeted the people instead of the aristocracy or the landed gentry, became known as the Populist movement. It was based upon the belief that the common people possessed the wisdom and peaceful ability to lead the nation.
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. This represented the ascendancy of anarchism in Russia
as a powerful revolutionary force. Finally, after several attempts,
Alexander II was assassinated by anarchists 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
Russian field gun during the Battle of Mukden
Unlike his father, the new tsar Alexander III (1881–1894) was throughout his reign a staunch reactionary who revived the maxim of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and National Character" commmitted 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 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 new revolutionary movement
Ethnic and religious map of European Russia at the end of the 19th century. This imperial-era map shows Russians ("Great Russians"), Belarusians ("White Russians"), and Ukrainians ("Little Russians") in a single colour; based on 1897 Russian census.
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. Politically, these opposition forces
organized into three competing parties: The liberal elements among the
industrial capitalists and nobility, who believed in peaceful social
reform and a constitutional monarchy, founded the Constitutional Democratic party or Kadets in 1905. Followers of the Narodnik tradition established the Socialist-Revolutionary Party or Esers
in 1901, advocating the distribution of land among those who actually
worked it—the peasants. A third radical group founded the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party or RSDLP in 1898; this party was the primary exponent 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 RSDLP split into two wings: the radical Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the relatively moderate Mensheviks,
led by 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 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.
Revolution of 1905
Hall of the Sessions of the State Duma
The disastrous performance of the Russian armed forces in the Russo-Japanese War was a major blow to the Russian State 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 Saint 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.
In October 1905, Nicholas reluctantly issued the 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 avant-garde
The Russian avant-garde was a large, influential wave of modern art that flourished in Russian Empire and Soviet Union,
approximately from 1890 to 1930—although some have placed its beginning
as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960. The term covers many
separate art movements of the era in painting, literature, music and
architecture.
World War I
Russian Expeditionary Force in France, October 1916
The Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary was assassinated by
Bosnian Serbs on 28 June 1914. An ultimatum followed to Serbia, which
was considered a Russian client-state, by Austro-Hungary on 23 July.
Russia had no treaty obligation to Serbia, and in long-term perspective,
Russia was militarily gaining on Germany and Austro-Hungary, and thus
had an incentive to wait. Most Russian leaders wanted to avoid a war.
However, in the present crisis they had the support of France, and they
feared that the failure to support Serbia would lead to a loss of
Russian credibility and a major political defeat to Russia's goals for a
leadership role in the Balkans. Tsar Nicholas II mobilised Russian forces on 30 July 1914 to defend Serbia from Austria-Hungary. Christopher Clark
states: "The Russian general mobilisation [of 30 July] was one of the
most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the
general mobilisations. It came at the moment when the German government
had not yet even declared the State of Impending War".
Germany responded with her own mobilisation and declaration of War on 1
August 1914. At the opening of hostilities, the Russians took the
offensive against both Germany and Austria-Hungary.
The very large but poorly equipped Russian army fought
tenaciously and desperately at times despite its lack of organization
and very weak logistics. Casualties were enormous. By 1915, many
soldiers were sent to the front unarmed, and told to pick up whatever
weapons they could from the battlefield. Nevertheless, the Russian army
fought on, and tied down large numbers of Germans and Austrians. When
civilians showed a surge of patriotism, the tsar and his entourage
failed to exploit it for military benefit. Instead, they relied on
slow-moving bureaucracies. In areas where they did advance against the
Austrians, they failed to rally the ethnic and religious minorities that
were hostile to Austria, such as Poles. The tsar refused to cooperate
with the national legislature, the Duma, and listened less to experts
than to his wife, who was in thrall to her chief advisor, the so-called
holy man Grigori Rasputin. More than two million refugees fled.
Repeated military failures and bureaucratic ineptitude soon turned large segments of the population against the government. The German and Ottoman fleets prevented Russia from importing supplies and exporting goods through the Baltic and Black seas.
By the middle of 1915 the impact of the war was demoralizing.
Food and fuel were in short supply, casualties kept occurring, and
inflation was mounting. Strikes increased among low-paid factory
workers, and the peasants, who wanted land reforms, were restless.
Meanwhile, elite distrust of the regime was deepened by reports that
Rasputin was gaining influence; his assassination in late 1916 ended the
scandal but did not restore the autocracy's lost prestige.
Soviet Russia (1917–1922)
Russian Revolution
The Tsarist system was completely overthrown in February 1917. Rabinowitch argues:
The February 1917 revolution...grew out of prewar political and economic instability, technological backwardness, and fundamental social divisions, coupled with gross mismanagement of the war effort, continuing military defeats, domestic economic dislocation, and outrageous scandals surrounding the monarchy.
In late February (3 March 1917), a strike occurred in a factory in the capital Petrograd
(the new name for Saint Petersburg). On 23 February (8 March) 1917,
thousands of female textile workers walked out of their factories
protesting the lack of food and calling on other workers to join them.
Within days, nearly all the workers in the city were idle, and street
fighting broke out. The tsar ordered the Duma to disband, ordered
strikers to return to work, and ordered troops to shoot at demonstrators
in the streets. His orders triggered the February Revolution,
especially when soldiers openly sided with the strikers. The tsar and
the aristocracy fell on 2 March, as Nicholas II abdicated.
To fill the vacuum of authority, the Duma declared a Provisional Government, headed by Prince Lvov, which was collectively known as the Russian Republic.
Meanwhile, the socialists in Petrograd organized elections among
workers and soldiers to form a soviet (council) of workers' and
soldiers' deputies, as an organ of popular power that could pressure the
"bourgeois" Provisional Government.
The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on 6 January 1918. The Tauride Palace is locked and guarded by Trotsky, Sverdlov, Zinoviev and Lashevich.
In July, following a series of crises that undermined their authority
with the public, 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 or many Russians discontented with the deepening
economic crisis and the continuation of the war. While Kerensky's
government marked time, the socialist-led soviet in Petrograd joined
with soviets that formed throughout the country to create a national
movement.
The German government provided over 40 million gold marks to
subsidize Bolshevik publications and activities subversive of the
tsarist government, especially focusing on disgruntled soldiers and
workers. In April 1917 Germany provided a special sealed train to carry Vladimir Lenin
back to Russia from his exile in Switzerland. 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 Constituent Assembly (elected in December 1917)
refused to become a rubber stamp of the Bolsheviks, it was dissolved by
Lenin's troops and all vestiges of 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. Russia lost much of her western borderlands.
However, when Germany was defeated the Soviet government repudiated the
Treaty.
Russian Civil War
Anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army in South Russia, January 1918
The Russian famine of 1921 killed an estimated five million people.
The Bolshevik grip on power was by no means secure, and a lengthy
struggle broke out between the new regime and its opponents, which
included the Socialist Revolutionaries, right-wing "Whites", and large
numbers of peasants. At the same time the Allied powers sent several expeditionary armies
to support the anti-Communist forces in an attempt to force Russia to
rejoin the world war. The Bolsheviks fought against both these forces
and national independence movements in the former Russian Empire. By
1921, they had defeated their internal enemies and brought most of the
newly independent states under their control, with the exception of
Finland, the Baltic States, the Moldavian Democratic Republic (which joined Romania), and Poland (with whom they had fought the Polish–Soviet War). Finland also annexed the region Pechenga of the Russian Kola peninsula; Soviet Russia and allied Soviet republics conceded the parts of its territory to Estonia (Petseri County and Estonian Ingria), Latvia (Pytalovo), and Turkey (Kars). Poland incorporated the contested territories of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, the former parts of the Russian Empire (except Galicia) east to Curzon Line.
Both sides regularly committed brutal atrocities against civilians. During the civil war era White Terror (Russia) for example, Petlyura and Denikin's forces massacred 100,000 to 150,000 Jews in Ukraine and southern Russia. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were left homeless and tens of thousands became victims of serious illness.
Estimates for the total number of people killed during the Red Terror
carried out by the Bolsheviks vary widely. One source asserts that the
total number of victims of repression and pacification campaigns could
be 1.3 million, whereas others give estimates ranging from 10,000 in the initial period of repression to 50,000 to 140,000 and an estimate of 28,000 executions per year from December 1917 to February 1922. The most reliable estimations for the total number of killings put the number at about 100,000, whereas others suggest a figure of 200,000.
The Russian economy was devastated by the war, with factories and
bridges destroyed, cattle and raw materials pillaged, mines flooded and
machines damaged. The droughts of 1920 and 1921, as well as the 1921 famine, worsened the disaster still further. Disease had reached pandemic proportions, with 3,000,000 dying of typhus
alone in 1920. Millions more also died of widespread starvation. By
1922 there were at least 7,000,000 street children in Russia as a result
of nearly ten years of devastation from the Great War and the civil
war. Another one to two million people, known as the White émigrés, fled Russia, many with the White Gen. Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel—some
through the Far East, others west into the newly independent Baltic
countries. These émigrés included a large percentage of the educated and
skilled population of Russia.
Soviet Union (1922–1991)
Creation of the Soviet Union
Lenin and Stalin at Gorki (1922)
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 Russia before the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. At that time, the new nation included four constituent republics: the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, the 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.
However, 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. Land, all industry, and small businesses 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 to Russian society
Soviet
poster from 1932 symbolizing the reform of "old ways of life",
dedicated to liberation of women from traditional role of the oppressed
housekeeper. The text reads, "8 March is the day of the rebellion of the
working women against the kitchen slavery." "Say NO to the oppression
and Babbittry of the household work!"
As the Russian Empire included during this period not only the region
of Russia, but also today's territories of Ukraine, Belarus, Poland,
Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Moldavia and the Caucasian and Central Asian
countries, it is possible to examine the firm formation process in all
those regions. One of the main determinants of firm creation for given
regions of Russian Empire might be urban demand of goods and supply of
industrial and organizational skill.
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 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 center 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 favor 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.
In accordance with Marxist theory, the government also promoted atheism and materialism.
It opposed organized religion, especially 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, and 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 Soviet
history—a period of massive industrialization and internal struggles as Joseph Stalin
established near total control over Soviet society, wielding virtually
unrestrained power. 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 programme of industrialisation into action.
Flag of the Soviet Union, with the iconic hammer and sickle. This version was used from 1980 to 1991.
In 1929 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 through the buildup of heavy
industry, the collectivization of agriculture, and the restricted manufacture of consumer goods. For the first time in history a government controlled all economic activity.
As a part of the plan, the government took control of agriculture through the state and collective farms (kolkhozes). By a decree of February 1930, about one million individual peasants (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, Kazakhstan and parts of southwestern Russia.
The deteriorating conditions in the countryside drove millions of
desperate peasants to the rapidly growing cities, fueling
industrialization, and vastly increasing Russia's urban population in
the space of just a few years.
Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other generals convicted in the Trial of Red Army Generals in 1937 were declared innocent ("rehabilitated") in 1957.
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 19th
century and Japan's earlier in the 20th century.
While the Five-Year Plans were forging ahead, Stalin was establishing his personal power. The NKVD 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.
An estimated 18 million people passed through the Gulag system, and
perhaps another 15 million had experience of some other form of forced
labor.
Soviet Union on the international stage
The Soviet Union viewed the 1933 accession of fervently anti-Communist Hitler's government to power in Germany with great alarm from the onset, especially since Hitler proclaimed the Drang nach Osten as one of the major objectives in his vision of the German strategy of Lebensraum. The Soviets supported the republicans of Spain who struggled against fascist German and Italian troops in the Spanish Civil War. In 1938–1939, immediately prior to WWII, the Soviet Union successfully fought against Imperial Japan in the Soviet–Japanese border conflicts in the Russian Far East, which led to Soviet-Japanese neutrality and the tense border peace that lasted until August 1945.
In 1938 Germany annexed Austria and, together with major Western European powers, signed the Munich Agreement
following which Germany, Hungary and Poland divided parts of
Czechoslovakia between themselves. German plans for further eastward
expansion, as well as the lack of resolve from Western powers to oppose
it, became more apparent. Despite the Soviet Union strongly opposing the
Munich deal and repeatedly reaffirming its readiness to militarily back
commitments given earlier to Czechoslovakia, the Western Betrayal
led to the end of Czechoslovakia and further increased fears in the
Soviet Union of a coming German attack. This led the Soviet Union to
rush the modernization of its military industry and to carry out its own
diplomatic maneuvers. In 1939 the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact: a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany dividing Eastern Europe into two separate spheres of influence. Following the pact, the USSR normalized relations with Nazi Germany and resumed Soviet–German trade.
World War II
WWII Soviet poster proclaiming: "Everything for the Front! Everything for the Victory!"
On 17 September 1939, sixteen days after the start of World War II and with the victorious Germans having advanced deep into Polish territory, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland,
stating as justification the "need to protect Ukrainians and
Belarusians" there, after the "cessation of existence" of the Polish
state.
As a result, the Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet republics' western
borders were moved westward, and the new Soviet western border was drawn
close to the original Curzon line. In the meantime negotiations with Finland over a Soviet-proposed land swap that would redraw the Soviet-Finnish border further away from Leningrad failed, and in December 1939 the USSR invaded Finland, beginning a campaign known as the Winter War (1939–40). The war took a heavy death toll on the Red Army but forced Finland to sign a Moscow Peace Treaty and cede the Karelian Isthmus and Ladoga Karelia. In summer 1940 the USSR issued an ultimatum to Romania forcing it to cede the territories of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. At the same time, the Soviet Union also occupied the three formerly independent Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania).
Soviet soldiers during the Battle of Stalingrad, the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare, the turning point on the Eastern Front, in the war against the Axis and in the entire WWII
Soviet
POWs starving in a Nazi camp. The Soviet Union lost around 27 million
people (soldiers and civilians) during the war, about half of all World War II casualties.
The peace with Germany was tense, as both sides were preparing for the military conflict, and abruptly ended when the Axis forces led by Germany swept across the Soviet border on 22 June 1941. By the autumn the German army had seized Ukraine, laid a siege of Leningrad, and threatened to capture the capital, Moscow, itself. Despite the fact that in December 1941 the Red Army threw off the German forces from Moscow
in a successful counterattack, the Germans retained the strategic
initiative for approximately another year and held a deep offensive in
the south-eastern direction, reaching the Volga and the Caucasus. However, two major German defeats in Stalingrad and Kursk proved decisive and reversed the course of the entire World War
as the Germans never regained the strength to sustain their offensive
operations and the Soviet Union recaptured the initiative for the rest
of the conflict. By the end of 1943, the Red Army had broken through the German siege of Leningrad and liberated much of Ukraine, much of Western Russia and moved into Belarus.
By the end of 1944, the front had moved beyond the 1939 Soviet
frontiers into eastern Europe. Soviet forces drove into eastern Germany,
capturing Berlin in May 1945. The war with Germany thus ended triumphantly for the Soviet Union.
_(B%26W).jpg)
Big Three in Yalta formed U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin led the Allies against the Axis centered on Nazi Germany.
As agreed at the Yalta Conference, three months after the Victory Day in Europe the USSR launched the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, defeating the Japanese troops in neighboring Manchuria, the last Soviet battle of World War II.
Although the Soviet Union was victorious in World War II, the war resulted in around 26–27 million Soviet deaths (estimates vary) and had devastated the Soviet economy in the struggle. Some 1,710 towns and 70,000 settlements were destroyed. The occupied territories suffered from the ravages of German occupation and deportations of slave labor by Germany.
Thirteen million Soviet citizens became victims of the repressive
policies of Germany and its allies in occupied territories, where people
died because of mass murders, famine, absence of elementary medical aid and slave labor. The Nazi Genocide of the Jews, carried out by German Einsatzgruppen
along with local collaborators, resulted in almost complete
annihilation of the Jewish population over the entire territory
temporarily occupied by Germany and its allies. During the occupation, the Leningrad region lost around a quarter of its population, Soviet Belarus lost from a quarter to a third of its population, and 3.6 million Soviet prisoners of war (of 5.5 million) died in German camps.
Cold War
General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev talks to U.S. President Richard Nixon on his visit to the United States, the high-water mark of détente.
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.
The Cold War emerged from 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 blocks 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 Hungarian Revolution of 1956, suppressing the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and supporting the suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s. The Soviet Union opposed the United States in a number of proxy conflicts all over the world, including the Korean War and Vietnam War.
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 the 1970s
in which the world was no longer clearly split into two clearly opposed
blocs. 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 beginning of the nine-year Soviet–Afghan War in 1979 and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, a staunch anti-communist, but improved as the communist 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.
De-Stalinization and the era of stagnation
Yuri Gagarin, first human to travel into space
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.
In 1964 Khrushchev was impeached by the Communist Party's Central Committee, charging him with a host of errors that included Soviet setbacks such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. After a period of collective leadership led by Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny, a veteran bureaucrat, Brezhnev, took Khrushchev's place as Soviet leader. Brezhnev emphasized heavy industry, instituted the Soviet economic reform of 1965, and also attempted to ease relationships with the United States. In the 1960s the USSR became a leading producer and exporter of petroleum and natural gas. Soviet science and industry peaked in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. The world's first nuclear power plant was established in 1954 in Obninsk, and the Baikal Amur Mainline was built.
The Soviet space program, founded by Sergey Korolev, was especially successful. On 4 October 1957 Soviet Union launched the first space satellite Sputnik. On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space in the Soviet spaceship Vostok 1. Other achievements of Russian space program include: the first photo of the far side of the Moon; exploration of Venus; the first spacewalk by Alexei Leonov; first female spaceflight by Valentina Tereshkova. More recently, the Soviet Union produced the world's first space station, Salyut which in 1986 was replaced by Mir, the first consistently inhabited long-term space station, that served from 1986 to 2001.
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva, November 1985
While all modernized economies were rapidly moving to computerization
after 1965, the USSR fell further and further behind. Moscow's decision
to copy the IBM 360 of 1965 proved a decisive mistake for it locked
scientists into an antiquated system they were unable to improve. They
had enormous difficulties in manufacturing the necessary chips reliably
and in quantity, in programming workable and efficient programs, in
coordinating entirely separate operations, and in providing support to
computer users.
One of the greatest strengths of Soviet economy was its vast
supplies of oil and gas; world oil prices quadrupled in the 1973–74, and
rose again in 1979–1981, making the energy sector the chief driver of
the Soviet economy, and was used to cover multiple weaknesses. At one
point, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin told the head of oil and gas production, "things are bad with bread. Give me 3 million tons [of oil] over the plan." Former prime minister Yegor Gaidar, an economist looking back three decades, in 2007 wrote:
The hard currency from oil exports stopped the growing food supply crisis, increased the import of equipment and consumer goods, ensured a financial base for the arms race and the achievement of nuclear parity with the United States, and permitted the realization of such risky foreign-policy actions as the war in Afghanistan.
Breakup of the Union
Leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords, dissolving the Soviet Union, 8 December 1991
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 former KGB Chief Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, transitional figures with deep roots in Brezhnevite tradition, Mikhail Gorbachev implemented perestroika in an attempt to modernize Soviet communism, and made significant changes in the party leadership. However, Gorbachev's social reforms led to unintended consequences. His policy of glasnost
facilitated public access to information after decades of government
repression, and social problems received wider public attention,
undermining the Communist Party's authority. Glasnost allowed ethnic and nationalist disaffection to reach the surface, and many constituent republics, especially the Baltic republics, Georgian SSR and Moldavian SSR, sought greater autonomy, which Moscow was unwilling to provide. In the revolutions of 1989
the USSR lost its allies in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev's attempts at
economic reform were not sufficient, and the Soviet government left
intact most of the fundamental elements of communist economy. Suffering
from low pricing of petroleum and natural gas, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and outdated industry and pervasive corruption, the Soviet planned economy proved to be ineffective, and by 1990 the Soviet government had lost control over economic conditions. Due to price control,
there were shortages of almost all products, reaching their peak in the
end of 1991, when people had to stand in long lines and were lucky to
buy even the essentials. Control over the constituent republics was also
relaxed, and they began to assert their national sovereignty over
Moscow.
Boris Yeltsin on election rally in Belgorod, 1996
The tension between Soviet Union and Russian SFSR authorities came to
be personified in the bitter power struggle between Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.
Squeezed out of Union politics by Gorbachev in 1987, Yeltsin, who
represented himself as a committed democrat, presented a significant
opposition to Gorbachev's authority. In a remarkable reversal of fortunes, he gained election as chairman of the Russian republic's new Supreme Soviet in May 1990. The following month, he secured legislation giving Russian laws priority over Soviet laws and withholding two-thirds of the budget. In the first Russian presidential election in 1991 Yeltsin became president of the Russian SFSR.
At last Gorbachev attempted to restructure the Soviet Union into a less centralized state. However, on 19 August 1991, a coup against Gorbachev,
conspired by senior Soviet officials, was attempted. The coup faced
wide popular opposition and collapsed in three days, but disintegration
of the Union became imminent. The Russian government took over most of
the Soviet Union government institutions on its territory. 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. In the Soviet Union, only Russian SFSR lacked
even the paltry instruments of statehood that the other republics
possessed, such as its own republic-level Communist Party branch, trade union councils, Academy of Sciences, and the like. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was banned in Russia in 1991–1992, although no lustration
has ever taken place, and many of its members became top Russian
officials. However, as the Soviet government was still opposed to market
reforms, the economic situation continued to deteriorate. By December
1991, the shortages had resulted in the introduction of food rationing
in Moscow and Saint Petersburg for the first time since World War II.
Russia received humanitarian food aid from abroad. After the Belavezha Accords, the Supreme Soviet of Russia withdrew Russia from the Soviet Union on 12 December. The Soviet Union officially ended on 25 December 1991, and the Russian Federation (formerly the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) took power on 26 December. The Russian government lifted price control on January 1992. Prices rose dramatically, but shortages disappeared.
Russian Federation (1991–present)
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. In the 1990s Russia suffered an economic downturn that was,
in some ways, more severe than the United States or Germany had
undergone six decades earlier in the Great Depression. Hyperinflation hit the ruble, due to monetary overhang from the days of the planned economy.
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 3 October, 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 close to a serious civil
conflict. Yeltsin was then free to impose the current Russian constitution
with strong presidential powers, which was approved by referendum in
December 1993. The cohesion of the Russian Federation was also
threatened when the republic of Chechnya attempted to break away, leading to the First and Second Chechen Wars.
Boris Nemtsov was killed on 27 February 2015 on a bridge near the Kremlin.
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 in order to reform the fully nationalized
Soviet economy. 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 tycoons) in league with criminal mafias or Western investors. Corporate raiders such as Andrei Volgin engaged in hostile takeovers of corrupt corporations by the mid-1990s.
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.
Meanwhile, the central government had lost control of the
localities, bureaucracy, and economic fiefdoms, and tax revenues had
collapsed. Still in a deep depression, Russia's economy was hit further
by the financial crash of 1998.
After the 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 FSB, the KGB's post-Soviet successor agency.
In 2000, the new acting president defeated his opponents in the
presidential election on 26 March, and won in a landslide four years
later. In 2001, Putin discussed with Bill Clinton the possibility of Russia joining NATO, without result.
Anti-war demonstrations took place in Moscow opposing the war in Eastern Ukraine.
International observers were alarmed by moves in late 2004 to further
tighten the presidency's control over parliament, civil society, and
regional officeholders. In 2008 Dmitri Medvedev, a former Gazprom chairman and Putin's head of staff, was elected new President of Russia. In 2012, Putin was once again elected as President.
Vladimir Putin (third, left), Sergey Aksyonov (first, left), Vladimir Konstantinov (second, left) and Aleksei Chalyi (right) sign the Treaty on Accession of the Republic of Crimea to Russia in 2014
Russia had difficulty attracting foreign direct investment and experienced large capital outflows. Russia's long-term problems include a shrinking workforce, rampant corruption, and underinvestment in infrastructure.
Nevertheless, reversion to a socialist command economy seemed almost impossible.
Russia ended 2006 with its eighth straight year of growth, averaging 6.7% annually since the financial crisis of 1998.
Although high oil prices and a relatively cheap ruble initially drove
this growth, since 2003 consumer demand and, more recently, investment
have played a significant role.
Russia is well ahead of most other resource-rich countries in its
economic development, with a long tradition of education, science, and
industry.
In 2014, following a referendum, in which separation was favored by a large majority of voters, the Russian leadership announced the accession of Crimea into the Russian Federation. The 2017–2018 Russian protests against alleged corruption in the federal Russian government took place in many Russian cities. In the first half of 2019 there were approximately 863 protests across the country.
