Russia's history: an empire that never drew a line around Russia

Who inherited the state of Kievan Rus

The first East Slavic state took shape along the Dnieper in the ninth century. The Primary Chronicle, compiled in Kiev in the twelfth century, says Oleg, ruler of Novgorod from about 879, seized Smolensk and Kiev in 882 and made Kiev his capital; the traditional starting date of Russian history is the calling of the Varangians in 862. The state lived on the river trade in furs, wax and slaves between Scandinavia and Constantinople. Vladimir I accepted Byzantine Christianity in 988, and his son Yaroslav gave Kiev the cathedral of St Sophia and the law code known as the Russian Law, dated to 1016.

How far the Varangians founded the state has been argued since the eighteenth century, and Britannica notes that the argument has carried nationalistic overtones from the start: recent Russian work has tended to minimise the Scandinavian role and some non-Russian work to exaggerate it. The same care applies to the inheritance. Rus was a loose federation of principalities under one dynasty, divided among Yaroslav's sons after his death in 1054, and Britannica's judgement is that no single regional culture, "perhaps least of all that of Muscovy", can be called the heir of Kiev, although all of them shared its inheritance. The territory of Rus lies today in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and this article treats the inheritance as shared among the three.

The Mongol invasion of 1237 to 1240 ended the Kievan period. Vladimir was burned on 4 February 1238 and Kiev was sacked in 1240. The south-western principalities of Galicia and Volhynia were absorbed by Poland and Lithuania by the fourteenth century. Novgorod escaped occupation and traded with the Hanseatic League. The north-east, Vladimir-Suzdal, paid tribute to the Golden Horde, and it was there that the Russian state would be rebuilt.

How Moscow rose by collecting the khan's tribute

Moscow began as a principality founded by Daniil, the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, and a vassal of Vladimir, and it rose by working for its overlords. The khans of the Golden Horde, ruling from Sarai on the lower Volga, granted Moscow's princes the title of grand prince and made them the agents who collected the Tatar tribute from the other Russian principalities. The head of the church, the Metropolitan, left Kiev for Vladimir in 1299 and a few years later settled permanently in Moscow. Under Mongol rule Muscovy built up its postal roads, its census, its fiscal system and its military organisation.

Dmitry Donskoy defeated the warlord Mamai at Kulikovo in 1380, and the khan Tokhtamysh sacked Moscow two years later in reprisal. The end of Mongol overlordship is conventionally dated to the standoff on the Ugra river in 1480. The research on this point records a disagreement: Muscovite bookmen later described the Ugra as the end of the "Tatar yoke", while tax collection by the Crimean khans and other overlords went on into the early sixteenth century.

Ivan III, who reigned from 1462 to 1505, annexed Novgorod and Tver, refused further tribute, and tripled the territory of his state. He married the Byzantine princess Sophia Palaiologina in 1472, adopted the double-headed eagle, created the first central government offices and issued the Sudebnik law code. A monk, Filofei of Pskov, wrote to him that his kingdom would be the Third Rome. The Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin, built between 1475 and 1479 by the Italian architect Aristotele Fioravanti, became the church where grand princes, tsars and emperors were crowned. The name itself changed in this period. Rosiya is first attested in 1387, and Rossiya, taken from the Byzantine Greek, spread in the fifteenth century as Moscow rose, although inhabitants went on calling the country Rus or the Muscovite state until the end of the seventeenth century.

When Russia became a state of many peoples

Ivan IV was crowned tsar in 1547, and in the decades that followed he annexed the Tatar khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan and Sibir, which nearly doubled a territory that was already large. The conquests gave Russia a Muslim Tatar population and made it a state of many peoples and faiths. The Cathedral of St Basil on Red Square was built between 1555 and 1560 to commemorate the victory over Kazan. His rule at home was violent: the oprichnina purges culminated in the massacre of Novgorod in 1570, and in 1571 the Crimean Tatars burned Moscow.

What the Time of Troubles showed about the state

The Rurik dynasty ended in 1598. The famine of 1601 to 1603, pretenders to the throne and a Polish-Lithuanian intervention followed; Polish forces occupied Moscow on 21 September 1610, and a volunteer army raised by the merchant Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky expelled them on 4 November 1612. An assembly of the land elected Michael Romanov tsar in February 1613, and the Romanovs ruled until 1917. Wikipedia's account attributes the state's survival to its central bureaucracy, whose officials went on serving whoever held the throne.

How serfdom and Siberia grew together

Two expansions ran through the seventeenth century. Cossack and trading parties crossed Siberia along its rivers in search of furs and ivory, reached the Pacific by the end of the 1640s, and in 1648 Semyon Dezhnyov sailed through the strait between Asia and America. At home the state completed the binding of peasants to the land. Runaway peasants became state fugitives, and the tax burden on peasants in the mid-seventeenth century was 100 times what it had been a century earlier. The Cossack leader Stenka Razin led a rising up the Volga that was crushed in 1670, and he was executed a year later.

What Peter and Catherine added to the empire

When Peter I came to power the state reached from the Baltic to the Pacific and held a population of only about 14 million. Its one northern port, Archangel on the White Sea, was frozen nine months of the year. Peter fought Sweden in the Great Northern War from 1700 to 1721, founded St Petersburg in 1703 on land taken in that war, moved the capital there in 1712 and took the title of emperor in 1721. He replaced the boyar council with a Senate in 1711, introduced the Table of Ranks in 1722 and abolished the patriarchate, placing the church under a Holy Synod led by a lay official. The official name he chose, Rossiyskaya imperiya, used the word for the state and all its subjects, and that choice outlasted the dynasty.

Catherine II, who took the throne in a coup in 1762 and ruled until 1796, extended the frontier to the Black Sea in two wars with the Ottoman Empire, annexed Crimea in 1783 and took most of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the partitions of Poland. The rising led by the Cossack Yemelyan Pugachev in 1773 threatened Moscow before it was crushed. Alexander I took Finland from Sweden in 1809 and Bessarabia from the Ottomans in 1812, and the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828 brought Armenia and Nakhchivan under Russian rule.

Napoleon invaded in 1812 with about 450,000 troops, took Moscow and lost most of his army on the retreat; between 85% and 90% of his soldiers died of disease, cold, starvation or ambush. Russia, with a population of around 43 million, lost about 1.5 million people that year, of whom 250,000 to 300,000 were soldiers. Russian troops entered Paris, and at the Congress of Vienna Alexander I became king of Congress Poland.

Why the tsars freed the serfs and kept autocracy

Defeat in the Crimean War, begun in 1853, exposed an army that could not be supplied without railways and a serf economy that could not sustain a war against industrial powers. In 1859 there were 23 million serfs in a population of 67 million. Alexander II abolished serfdom in 1861, and under its terms freed peasants bought their allotments from the landowners with state help and repaid the state at 5% of the land's cost each year, and the land was held collectively by the village commune, the mir, which divided it among households. Alexander also reformed the courts, set up elected local councils called zemstvos, introduced universal military service and sold Alaska to the United States in 1867. He was assassinated in 1881.

How far the empire stretched in its last decades

The empire conquered the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva in Central Asia in the same decades, and Alexander III, who reigned from 1881 to 1894, pursued Russification. By the end of the nineteenth century the empire covered about 22.8 million square kilometres, held more than 100 ethnic groups, and ethnic Russians made up about 45% of its population. The census of 1897 found 95% of the population living in the countryside, and some 80% of the empire's people at the turn of the century were peasants. The Trans-Siberian Railroad, begun in 1891, was finished inside Russian territory in 1916; more than 85,000 people worked on it.

How strikes forced the tsar to accept a parliament

Defeat by Japan in 1904 and 1905 and the shooting of petitioners at the Winter Palace in January 1905, remembered as Bloody Sunday, set off strikes across the empire. Nicholas II's October Manifesto of 1905 promised a legislative Duma, and a constitution followed in 1906. Pyotr Stolypin's laws after 1906 let peasants leave the commune and farm on their own, and by 1916 peasants owned or rented 90% of the arable land. The government kept emergency powers to adjourn the Duma and rule by decree, and used them.

How the revolution rebuilt the empire as a union

The First World War broke the monarchy. On 23 February 1917 under the old calendar, women textile workers in Petrograd walked out over the lack of food, the garrison mutinied, and Nicholas II abdicated on 2 March. A Provisional Government shared power with the Petrograd Soviet through the summer while peasants seized land and soldiers deserted, and the Bolsheviks took power in the October Revolution. When the Constituent Assembly elected in December 1917 refused to endorse them, Lenin's troops dissolved it. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, accepted on 3 March 1918, left Poland and the Baltic provinces in German hands and confirmed a separate treaty Ukraine had already signed. Nicholas II and his family were killed at Yekaterinburg on 17 July 1918.

The civil war of 1917 to 1922 followed. Typhus killed 3 million people in 1920, famine followed in 1921, at least 7 million children were living on the streets by 1922, and between one and two million people emigrated. The Bolsheviks reconquered most of the former empire; Finland, Poland and the three Baltic states stayed outside it.

On 30 December 1922 the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Transcaucasian republics formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a state roughly coterminous with the empire before Brest-Litovsk. Its constitution described a federation, and the Communist Party governed it from Moscow. The Russian republic's own title used Rossiyskaya, the civic word, because the ethnic Russkaya would have described one people among many. Inside the union, the Russian republic was also the one without its own Communist Party branch, trade union council or Academy of Sciences, because the union's institutions served it, and most people gave little thought to any difference between Russia and the Soviet Union before the late 1980s.

What Soviet rule cost the people it governed

The first five-year plan of 1929 abolished the New Economic Policy of the 1920s and collectivised agriculture. A decree of February 1930 forced about one million peasants labelled kulaks off their land, and the famine that followed killed several million people, mostly in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and south-western Russia. In the Great Purges of 1937 and 1938 about 700,000 people were executed. An estimated 18 million people passed through the Gulag labour camps, and whole nationalities were deported to Central Asia in the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. The korenizatsiya policy of the 1920s gave way from the mid-1930s to a return to the tsarist policy of Russification, and the languages of the union's peoples were moved to the Cyrillic alphabet.

Germany invaded on 22 June 1941. The war cost around 26 to 27 million Soviet lives, and some 70,000 settlements were destroyed. Of 5.5 million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner, 3.6 million died in German camps, and the Leningrad region lost around a quarter of its population. The Soviet Union ended the war in Berlin, took a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and tested an atomic bomb in 1949. Its border moved west with the war: in 1939 and 1940 it invaded eastern Poland, took the Karelian Isthmus from Finland and Bessarabia from Romania, and occupied the three Baltic states.

The union covered about 22.4 million square kilometres between 1946 and 1991. It launched Sputnik on 4 October 1957 and sent Yuri Gagarin into space on 12 April 1961, and after world oil prices quadrupled in 1973 and 1974 its export revenue came to rest on oil and gas.

Why Russia left a union it had run

Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms from the mid-1980s opened the press and the elections and loosened the centre's hold on the republics. In March 1990 the constitution was amended to end the party's guaranteed leading role. On 12 June 1990 the Congress of People's Deputies of the Russian republic declared sovereignty and gave Russian law priority over Soviet law, and a year later, on 12 June 1991, Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the republic with 57% of the vote. On 17 March 1991 a union-wide referendum had endorsed a reformed union with 77.85% of the vote, and the coup attempted against Gorbachev on 19 to 21 August 1991 collapsed in three days.

Ukraine confirmed its independence by referendum on 1 December 1991 with 91% of the vote. The leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords on 8 December, and on 12 December the Russian Supreme Soviet ratified them, denounced the treaty of 1922 and recalled its deputies, which left the union's lower chamber without a quorum. The Russian position was that it had nothing to secede from, since the union had already ceased to exist. Eleven republics confirmed the dissolution at Alma-Ata on 21 December, the same day Russia was authorised to take the Soviet seat at the United Nations. The Soviet flag over the Kremlin was lowered at 7.35 p.m. Moscow time on 25 December and the Russian tricolour raised at 7.45 p.m., and the upper chamber voted the union out of existence on 26 December. Britannica gives the formal dissolution as 31 December 1991.

The empire and the union were states in which Russians made up about half the population. At the census of 2010 they made up about four in five of the Federation's. By December 1991 shortages had brought food rationing to Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time since the Second World War, and price controls were lifted on 2 January 1992.

Where the Russian Federation has drawn its border

The new state's institutions were settled by force. A dispute between the president and the parliament ended on 3 October 1993, when tanks shelled the parliament building, and a new constitution was adopted by national vote on 12 December 1993. Its preamble speaks for "the multinational people of the Russian Federation" and describes the act as "reviving the sovereign statehood of Russia". Chechnya's attempt to break away led to two Chechen wars, and the financial crash of 1998 deepened the depression that followed the price liberalisation of 1992.

The border drawn in 1991 has since moved. In 2014, after a referendum whose official results favoured separation, Russia announced the accession of Crimea; Article 65 of the constitution now lists the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol among the subjects of the federation. Britannica describes the event as the annexation of the Ukrainian autonomous republic of Crimea, and Russia's membership of the Group of Eight was suspended as a result. On 24 February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and on 30 September 2022 it declared the annexation of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and most of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, against international opposition. This catalogue records the Russian position and the objection to it and takes no position on the border.

The population figures differ on the same point. The record gives 146,119,928 people on 1 January 2025. Wikipedia gives an estimate of 146.0 million for 2025, and 143.6 million once Crimea and Sevastopol are left out.