The founding of Novgorod in 862 by the Viking Rurik of Jutland is traditionally taken as the birth of what became the Russian state. Rurik's successor, Oleg, helped make Kiev the dominant regional power in the 10th and 11th centuries, until shifting trade routes rendered it a commercial backwater. The merchants of Novgorod eventually declared independence from Kiev and joined the emerging Hanseatic League, a federation of city-states that controlled Baltic and North Sea trade.
Centuries of prosperity were quashed in the 13th century by the marauding Mongolian Tatars, who held sway until 1480. The 16th century witnessed the ugly expansionist reign of Ivan the Terrible, whose incursions into the Volga region antagonised Poland and Sweden to Russia's later cost. When the 700-year Rurikid dynasty ended with the childless Fyodor, vengeful Swedish and Polish invaders each bloodily claimed the Russian throne. The issue was finally settled in 1613, with the 16-year-old Mikhail Romanov issuing in a dynasty that was to rule until 1917. Peter the Great, the dynasty's strongest ruler, celebrated vanquishing the Swedes by building a new capital in St Petersburg.
The 19th century began with a bang, thanks to Napoleon, and ended with the country in ominous turmoil. The long-suffering serfs were freed in 1861 and there was growing opposition to the repressive and autocratic tsarist rule. Peasants were angry at having to pay for land they regarded as their own, liberals advocated constitutional reform along western European lines and terrorists assassinated Alexander II in 1881. Many radicals fled, including the famous exile Vladimir Ulyanov, better known by his later nom de guerre, Lenin.
Under the young, weak Nicholas II, ignominious defeat in the war with Japan (1904-5) led to further unrest. The massacre of civilians on Bloody Sunday led to mass strikes and the murder of industrialists. Social Democrat activists formed workers' councils (soviets), and a general strike in October 1905 brought the country to its knees. The tsar finally buckled and permitted the formation of the country's first parliament (duma), only to disband it when he didn't like its leftist demands. Russia's disastrous performance in WWI fomented further unrest. Soldiers and police mutinied and a reconvened duma assumed government, manned by the commercial elite. Soviets of workers and soldiers were also formed, thus creating two alternative power bases. Both were unified in their demands for the abdication of the tsar, an action Nicholas was forced to undertake on 1 March 1917.
On 25 October a splinter group of Social Democrats (known as Bolsheviks and led by the exiled Lenin) seized control and empowered the soviets as the ruling councils. Headed by Lenin and supported by Trotsky and the Georgian Stalin, the soviet government redistributed land to those who worked it, signed an armistice with Germany and created Trotsky's Red Army. In March 1918 the Bolshevik Party was renamed the Communist Party and the nation's capital was moved from Petrograd (St Petersburg's new, un-German-sounding name) to Moscow. Strongholds of those hostile to the communist regime had developed in the south and east of the country. Their collective name, the Whites, was their only source of cohesion. Three years of civil war resulted, with over a million citizens fleeing.
The economic consequences of the civil war were disastrous, culminating in the enormous famine of 1920-21. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established in 1922 and, following Lenin's death in January 1924, a new world record in the mistreatment of fellow humans was achieved by his successor, Stalin. He introduced farm collectivisation, destroying the peasantry both as a class and as a way of life. Millions were executed or exiled to Siberian concentration camps.
Russia's nonagression pact with Germany set the scene for WWII, with Hitler and Stalin passing states between them like hot potatoes. The tables turned in 1941 when Hitler's Operation Barbarossa issued in a bloody period of warfare that would eventually kill a sixth of the population. The battles for Leningrad (former Petrograd) and Stalingrad (today again known as Volgograd) were particularly protracted and obscene. One million Soviet troops died defending Stalingrad, the symbolically important namesake of their leader.
At the war's end, the Soviet's 'liberation' of Eastern Europe was soon recognised as a misnomer. Russia's extended control over much of Eastern Europe was the key to its emergence as one of the world's superpowers. Stalin re-established the old pattern of unpredictable purges and, as the Cold War developed, he established Western ideology as the country's new enemy. Following Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Krushchev emerged as leader and cautiously attempted to de-Stalinise the Party, while brazenly arming Cuba. His efforts were undone by the conservative Brezhnev, and JFK's brinkmanship. Despite increased repression, dissident movements sprang up. But change was on the way and Russian communism's poor image was soon thoroughly overhauled by soviet iconoclast Mikhail Gorbachov.
Gorbachov introduced political and economic reforms (perestroika) and called for greater openness (glasnost). In 1988 he held elections to transfer power from the Party to a new parliament. Reduced repression led to the eventual independence of the 15 Soviet republics, with the Baltic republics leading the way. This reduced sphere of influence and severe economic crisis caused Gorbachov domestic strife. A reactionary coup in August 1991 opened the way for his even more radical successor, Boris Yeltsin.
Post-Soviet Russia was marked by the misdealings of corrupt officials, financiers and out-and-out gangsters, as well as soaring rates of drug abuse, racketeering and murder. Despite the unpopularity of change, Russians narrowly voted back the indecisive, dictatorial president Yeltsin in mid-1996 elections. The Yeltsin era was marked by the globalisation - by hook and by crook - of the Russian economy. The new democracy veered between the rise of ultra-nationalism and communist nostalgia. By 1999 things were looking even shakier - Yeltsin sacked his governments regularly, but the economy was getting steadily gloomier. In August 1998 the ruble was floated and immediately went into freefall. In March 2000, Vladimir Putin became president of Russia, after six months in a caretaker position.
By the turn of the millennium, Moscow could boast more billionaire residents than any other city except New York. Russia became the world's largest oil exporter outside of OPEC and, much to everyone's surprise, the economic climate brightened.
Russia's military reputation, however, continued its decline. The war in Chechnya dragged on. In August 2000 the Kursk nuclear submarine sank in the Barents Sea, losing the entire crew, and the Navy reaction was marked by secrecy and incompetence. About 120 people died when paratroopers stormed a Moscow theatre where Chechen rebels had taken a theatre audience hostage.
Putin's strong-arm tactics in combatting Chechen terrorism and the new oil oligopoly have made the former spy popular and won him a second term in 2004, despite local and international concerns about the erosion of Russia's fragile democratic values.
History of Russia
