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The Grand Principality of Moscow, or Muscovy, known as the Principality of Moscow until 1389, was a late medieval Russian monarchy. Its capital was the city of Moscow. Originally established as a minor principality in the 13th century, the grand principality was transformed into a centralized Russian state in the late 15th century.

Moscow became a separate principality when Daniel ( r. 1263-1303), the youngest son of Alexander Nevsky, received the city and surrounding area as an appanage. By the end of the 13th century, Moscow had become one of the leading principalities within the Vladimir grand principality, alongside Tver. A struggle between the princes of Moscow and Tver began after Mikhail of Tver became grand prince in 1304. Yury ( r. 1303-1325) contested the title and was later made grand prince in 1318 by the khan of the Golden Horde, who held suzerainty over the princes. However, Yury lost the title four years later.

Ivan I ( r. 1325-1340) regained the title of grand prince and was able to collect tribute for the khan from other Russian princes, which increased Moscow's wealth. The seat of the Russian Orthodox Church was also moved from Vladimir to Moscow, establishing it as the spiritual center of Russian Orthodoxy. Ivan I defeated Tver and secured the grand princely title for his sons, Simeon ( r. 1340-1353) and Ivan II ( r. 1353-1359). After Ivan II's death, the title was temporarily lost until Dmitry ( r. 1359-1389) regained it and elevated Moscow to a grand principality. He also inflicted a milestone defeat on the Tatars in 1380, which greatly increased Moscow's prestige.

As the Golden Horde declined, its hegemony was increasingly challenged. Vasily I ( r. 1389-1425) expanded his principality, but was ultimately forced to resume paying tribute due to Tatar raids. Vasily II ( r. 1425-1462) consolidated his control of Moscow after a civil war and his reign saw the Russian Church declare autocephaly. Ivan III ( r. 1462-1505) absorbed nearly all of the Russian states and laid the foundations for a centralized state. His reign marks the end of the appanage period and the beginning of a new period in Russian history known as Muscovite Russia. His defeat of the Tatars in 1480 also traditionally marks the end of Tatar suzerainty. Vasily III ( r. 1505-1533) completed the annexation of the remaining appanages, and his son Ivan IV ( r. 1533-1584) was crowned as the first Russian tsar in 1547, thereby formally establishing the Tsardom of Russia.

The English names Moscow and Muscovy, for the city, the principality, and the river, are derived from post-classical Latin Moscovia, Muscovia, and ultimately from the Old Russian fully vocalized accusative form , Moskov'. Moscow is first mentioned under the year 1147 in the locative case ( na Moskvě). The modern Russian form, Moskva, first appears in the 14th century.

The oldest endonyms used in documents were Rus ( Russian: Русь) and the "Russian land" ( Russian: Русская земля, Zadonshchina, which belongs to the Russkaya zemlya). The 14th-century Kulikovo cycle of works, stresses the unity of the Russian princes and describes the principalities of Moscow, Novgorod, and others as being part of the "Russian land". A new form of the name became common by the 15th century; the vernacular Rus was transformed into Ros(s)iya or Rus(s)iya, and borrowed from Greek: Ρωσία, Latin: Russia. In the 1480s, the scribes Ivan Cherny and Mikhail Medovartsev mention Russia under the name Rosía or Rosia (), and Medovartsev also mentions the sceptre "of Russian lordship" (Росийскаго господства , Rosiyskago gospodstva).

In the 14th century, the grand princes of Moscow began to style themselves as the rulers of all Russia. During his consolidation of territories, Ivan III adopted the title of sovereign ( gosudar) of all Russia. After rejecting Mongol suzerainty, he also styled himself as autocrat ( samoderzhets). In his foreign correspondence, he adopted the title of tsar and rejected the offer of kingship by the Holy Roman Emperor; however, it would not be until 1547 that the title of tsar became official with the coronation of his grandson, Ivan IV. Ivan III also laid claim to the legacy of Kievan Rus', which led to conflicts with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Russian state was later also known in Western Europe as Muscovy under Polish-Lithuanian influence, and the use of both names persisted until the early 18th century.

Moscow is first mentioned in chronicles under the year 1147, as part of the principality of Rostov-Suzdal. The importance of Moscow greatly increased during the second half of the 12th century, and it was converted into a fortified gorod (stronghold) in the 1150s. On the death of Vsevolod III in 1212, Moscow appears to have been passed to his son Yury, who succeeded his father as the grand prince of Vladimir. During the Mongol invasions of 1237-1238, Moscow was sacked following the destruction of Ryazan. The city is not mentioned again until the late 13th century.

The first prince of Moscow was Daniel ( r. 1263-1303), the youngest son of Aleksandr Nevsky, and he was given Moscow as an , where he established a local branch of Rurikid princes. Until 1271, the principality was ruled by the governors of Daniel's uncle Yaroslav. Daniel himself is first mentioned under the year 1282 as taking part in a feudal war between his two older brothers. The 16th-century Book of Royal Degrees says that Daniel was given Moscow on his father's death in 1263. The size of the original territory of the Moscow principality is not known, but it likely encompassed the basin of the upper Moskva River, stretching approximately between the eastern influx of the Gzhelka and the western influx of the Ruza. The northeast of the territory consisted of the basin of the upper Klyazma.

By the turn of the century, Moscow was one of the leading principalities within Vladimir-Suzdal. Daniel defeated Ryazan in 1301, after which Kolomna and Serpukhov were incorporated into the Moscow principality. Pereyaslavl was also temporarily annexed to Moscow, and after Daniel's death, his sons seized Mozhaysk in 1304. At this point, the territory of the principality had increased almost three-fold and included the entire Moskva River along with its tributaries, allowing Moscow to become self-sufficient. Its southern border included a large stretch of the Oka, from Serpukhov to the east of Kolomna, which gave it some protection from Tatar incursions. To the east, there was a dense forest zone which functioned as a natural barrier. Moscow also had access to the northern areas of Ryazan and direct access to Vladimir. It was also provided with a river network that facilitated trade.

Yury ( r. 1303-1325) began his reign with a struggle against Tver for succession to the grand principality. According to traditional succession practices, the throne was to be passed to Andrey's eldest cousin, Mikhail of Tver. As Daniel had died before he could become grand prince, his descendants were barred from the title. Yury decided to contest Mikhail's claim to the title, but ultimately the decision went to Toqta, the khan of the Golden Horde, who held suzerainty over the principalities and later confirmed Mikhail as the grand prince in 1305. In 1306, Yury established his authority over Ryazan with support from the khan as part of the Tatars' strategy to adjust the balance of power in the conflict between Moscow and Tver. Mikhail of Tver attempted to consolidate his power, and was confirmed as the prince of Novgorod in 1307, but Yury retained control of Pereyaslavl and was able to gain control of Nizhny Novgorod. Mikhail marched against Moscow in 1308, but the Muscovites were able to stand their ground. Mikhail also failed to win the support of the church, and when he launched an expedition to Nizhny Novgorod, his army was stopped by Metropolitan Peter in Vladimir.

After Toqta died in 1312, Mikhail visited Sarai to renew his patent and pay respects to the new khan, Özbeg, staying there for two years. In his absence, the Novgorodians launched a revolt against Mikhail's governors and sent an appeal to Yury, who was confirmed as their prince in 1315. However, Mikhail was able to convince the khan to summon Yury and remove him from the political scene. Mikhail was able to establish his authority in Novgorod once again, but in 1317, Yury returned with a patent for the grand princely title, a Tatar army, and a Tatar wife, who was the sister of the khan. Kavgady, the chief representative of the khan, sent his ambassadors to Tver to scare Mikhail into submission, but Mikhail's army proceeded to defeat Yury's army in December 1317. In early 1318, the two parties met on the Volga for another battle, but they reached an agreement. Kavgady and Yury laid their accusations against Mikhail and a formal trial took place at the end of the year. Mikhail was executed at the Horde and Yury was made the grand prince.

Little is known about Yury's reign as grand prince, but relations between Moscow and Tver soon improved and a treaty was concluded in 1319 between Yury and Dmitry of Tver. However, in 1321, a representative of the khan instructed Yury to march on Tver. The two forces met on the Volga and a battle was narrowly avoided. In the treaty, Dmitry agreed to refrain from making himself the grand prince and he paid the tribute owed to the Tatars. Yury was then summoned to Novgorod, and instead of proceeding to Sarai with the tribute, he led the defense of the republic against Swedish forces. As a result, Dmitry went to Sarai and received the patent for the grand princely title in 1322. Yury was then summoned by Özbeg, and on his way to Sarai, Dmitry's brother Aleksandr robbed him in the Rzhev area and forced him to flee to Pskov. Yury finally visited Sarai in 1325 to face the consequences, but Dmitry of Tver murdered him as revenge for the death of his father. The following year, the khan ordered his execution.

The Moscow Kremlin under Ivan Kalita, painting by Apollinary Vasnetsov, 1921

Ivan I ( r. 1325-1340) became prince following the murder of Yury, while the title of grand prince went to Aleksandr of Tver. After the residents of Tver launched a revolt against Tatar rule in 1327, Özbeg Khan dispatched a punitive force led by Ivan and Aleksandr of Suzdal, causing Aleksandr of Tver to flee to Lithuania. Afterwards, Ivan presented himself before Özbeg and was given the title of grand prince. Özbeg divided the principalities of Vladimir and Novgorod between Aleksandr of Suzdal and Ivan, and upon Aleksandr's death in 1331, Ivan became the sole grand prince. Aleksandr of Tver eventually returned to Tver and was given a full pardon and reinstated as prince by the khan. However, Aleksandr was soon recalled to Sarai in 1339, where he was executed due to accusations made against him. The death of Aleksandr marked the end of the struggle between Moscow and Tver, and Ivan's nephew-in-law, Konstantin, continued to rule Tver as a loyal servant.

To secure his position, Ivan began absorbing surrounding principalities. In particular, Ivan was credited by his grandson Dmitry Donskoy in his will with purchasing the principalities of Beloozero, Galich and Uglich. Ivan also developed Moscow to attract people and produce the resources needed to maintain his position, a policy reflected in his sobriquet, Kalita ( lit.  ' moneybag '). As grand prince, Ivan collected tribute from not only his own possessions but also from other Russian princes that were dependent on him. The khan at the start of Ivan's reign was content with allowing the Muscovite prince to enjoy undisputed supremacy. As a result, Ivan was able to use the funds he acquired to develop Moscow. He also had access to Novgorod's wealth, which helped him to pay the tribute; however, relations with Novgorod worsened following the election of a new archbishop in 1330, which paved the way for a pro-Lithuanian faction in the city.

At the beginning of Ivan's reign, the Russian Orthodox metropolitan, Peter, moved his residence to Moscow in 1325. During Peter's tenure in Moscow, Ivan laid the foundation for the Dormition Cathedral, which was built using stone. Peter had intended to make Moscow his burial place, and therefore the religious center of the country, and he died in 1326. Peter was succeeded by Theognostus, who, like his predecessor, pursued policies that supported the rise of Moscow. During the first four years of his tenure, the Dormition Cathedral was completed and an additional four stone churches were constructed. Theognostus also proceeded with the canonization of Peter in 1339, which helped to increase Moscow's prestige. The princes of Moscow functioned as the primary protectors of the Russian Church and Moscow became a pilgrimage center. Ivan even acquired an aura of sanctity in the eyes of future generations.

Ivan I and Simeon, frescoes of the Archangel Cathedral, 1652-1666

Simeon ( r. 1340-1353) succeeded his father as prince upon the latter's death. Although Simeon had to contend with three rival princes for the grand princely title, Özbeg had approved his father's will in 1339, indicating that he supported Simeon's succession to the grand princely throne. Simeon received the patent a few months later. As a result, the princes of Moscow continued to hold the title almost uninterruptedly. At the start of Simeon's reign, the principality of Bryansk returned to Moscow's sphere of influence after the pro-Muscovite Dmitry Romanovich was once again installed as prince. As a demonstration of his political sympathies, Dmitry had his daughter married to Simeon's younger brother Ivan. In 1352, Simeon marched into the neighboring principality of Smolensk, located to the west of Moscow, and was able to extend his authority there with the removal of the pro-Lithuanian prince, who was likely replaced with either Dmitry Romanovich's son or nephew. As a result, Simeon was able to temporarily halt the eastward expansion of Lithuania. He was also able to sign a treaty with Novgorod, in which the city recognized Simeon as its prince and agreed to grant him additional tax revenues.

Although the khan, Jani Beg, was prepared to support Simeon in his conflict with Lithuania, he was unwilling to provide unlimited support to Moscow, for fear that it would become too strong. He permitted the grand prince to enjoy the traditional rights of the throne and to maintain his nominal authority over other princes, but he interfered in Moscow's relations with Suzdal, supported anti-Muscovite elements in Ryazan, and contributed to Tver's fragmentation. When Jani Beg first occupied the throne, Simeon's cousin Konstantin took advantage of the power struggle in Sarai and took control of Nizhny Novgorod and Gorodets. Simeon attempted to dislodge his cousin, and in 1343, he convinced the boyars of Nizhny Novgorod and Gorodets to switch allegiance, but Jani Beg returned the boyars to Konstantin and confirmed him as prince. In 1352-1353, the Black Death reached Russia, which killed Simeon, his brother Andrey, along with his sons. In addition, the plague killed Metropolitan Theognostus. The ruling family of Moscow remained small as a result of the Black Death, and a new vertical pattern of princely succession from father to son was defined.

Ivan II ( r. 1353-1359) went to Sarai following the death of his older brother, where he presented himself to the khan as a candidate for the patent for the grand princely title. His main opponent was Konstantin of Nizhny Novgorod-Suzdal, who had greater support than the rival princes before him. Novgorod sent a delegation to the khan requesting him to give the patent to Konstantin, due to Ivan's previous refusal to aid the Novgorodian army in besieging the Swedish-held fortress of Orekhov in 1348. Despite this, Jani Beg gave the patent to Ivan due to Konstantin's dynastic links with Lithuania. In 1355, Konstantin signed a treaty of friendship with Moscow and at the same time, the city of Novgorod "made peace with Prince Ivan". Following Konstantin's death the same year, his eldest son Andrey succeeded him and drew a treaty with Ivan the next year. In exchange for gifts, Andrey recognized the prince of Moscow as his "elder brother", or his feudal superior.

During the first four years of Ivan's reign, there are no signs of any antagonism between Ivan and Grand Duke Algirdas of Lithuania. Ivan did not strengthen control of his brother's gains and was disinterested in his former father-in-law's principality of Bryansk. In 1356, Algirdas captured Bryansk and Smolensk; however, Ivan did not provide military assistance, leading to Vasily of Smolensk to turn to the khan instead. Although no formal treaty was drawn, Ivan had one of his daughters married to the son of Karijotas, the fifth eldest son of Gediminas. Ivan continued his reversal of Simeon's policies by allying himself with the princes of Suzdal. In addition, he supported the sons of Aleksandr of Tver and not the pro-Muscovite house of Kashin in Tver. Khvost, a friend of Ivan amongst the boyars, was murdered by the senior boyars, who had been staunch supporters of Simeon. As a result, Ivan significantly changed his policy in 1357, first by signing a treaty with Vasily of Kashin. In 1358, a joint expedition with Mozhaysk and Tver drove the Lithuanians out of Rzhev. The following year, Algirdas launched an attack, regaining control of Smolensk and Rzhev while taking control of Mstislavl in the Smolensk principality.

Dmitry Donskoy in the Battle of Kulikovo, painting by Adolphe Yvon, 1849

Dmitry ( r. 1359-1389) became prince at the age of nine following his father's death. Metropolitan Alexius effectively became the ruler of Moscow, and he equated the interests of the Russian Church with those of the Moscow principality. The murder of Berdi Beg in 1359 led to great turmoil within the Golden Horde, with repeated coups. The warlord Mamai established his own , exercising his authority with khans that he controlled. Dmitry of Nizhny Novgorod-Suzdal renewed the claim to the grand princely title, but after a period of negotiations, the khan Murad recognized Dmitry of Moscow as grand prince in 1362. Alexius also approached Mamai's protégé Abdallāh and received his approval as well in order to strengthen Dmitry's claim. However, Murad withdrew his recognition in response and instead recognized Dmitry of Suzdal as grand prince. After the Muscovite army made a show of force, Dmitry of Suzdal abandoned his claim to the title and in 1364, he signed a treaty of friendship with Moscow. Two years later, he arranged for his daughter to marry Dmitry of Moscow.

After taking the throne, Mikhail II of Tver mounted a direct challenge to Moscow's pre-eminence with Lithuanian support. Alexius continued to support the appanage princes of Tver against Mikhail, and by 1368, the conflict had escalated when the Muscovite army invaded Tver. The Lithuanian army came to Mikhail's aid, but the new stone walls of Moscow were able to withstand the siege. Dmitry launched another invasion in 1370, taking advantage of Lithuanian involvement in other conflicts. Mikhail visited Mamai's court and received the patent, but was unable to enforce his claim without Lithuanian assistance. Mikhail received another patent the following year, but Dmitry convinced the khan to restore him the title, while Alexius negotiated a peace treaty with Lithuania and had Dmitry's cousin Vladimir of Serpukhov married to one of the daughters of Algirdas. Mikhail once again received the patent in 1375, but Dmitry retained the loyalty of the other princes, and the combined forces defeated Mikhail's army. Mikhail made peace and acknowledged Dmitry as his "elder brother".

Sergius of Radonezh blessing Alexander Peresvet before the Battle of Kulikovo, miniature from the Illustrated Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible

Dmitry expanded his domain by incorporating the principalities of Beloozero, Galich and Uglich, those that he credited his grandfather Ivan I with purchasing. As Moscow grew, the warlord Timur built his own empire in Central Asia and recruited Tokhtamysh into his ranks. Tokhtamysh took control of Sarai and united the Horde under his rule. After a period of relative stability, the rise of Tokhtamysh threatened the position of Mamai, who opted to reduce the Russian principalities into submission. In 1378, Dmitry mobilized his forces against him and won a victory in the Battle of the Vozha River. Afterwards, Mamai mobilized a large army and made an alliance with Lithuania. He also recruited Oleg II of Ryazan, whose domain had been exposed to constant attack from the steppe. Dmitry gathered troops from all the territories he controlled, although no forces were sent from Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod or Tver. He was joined by Andrei of Polotsk and Dmitry of Bryansk, members of the Lithuanian ruling house who were enemies of their half-brother Jogaila. Before the Lithuanian army could join Mamai's forces, the Russian troops defeated them in the 1380 Battle of Kulikovo and Mamai fled south.

Although later generations saw the Russian victory as a triumph, the principalities remained under Mongol suzerainty and Tokhtamysh launched a punitive expedition, sacking Moscow in 1382. Despite this, Moscow greatly increased its prestige and Dmitry made Oleg of Ryazan recognize him as his feudal superior again. After Moscow was sacked, Dmitry accepted Mongol suzerainty and he was confirmed as the grand prince. The khan forced him to collect an exceptionally large amount of tribute and held his son Vasily as hostage. The wealthiest center in Russia, Novgorod, objected to paying a special tax, leading to Dmitry to launch an expedition in 1386 to force the city to pay. In the last years of his reign, Dmitry focused on strengthening his authority among the Russian princes, particularly those of Tver and Ryazan. Dmitry made the first deliberate move towards primogeniture and he guaranteed his eldest son, Vasily, that he would succeed him. In his testament, he bequeathed the grand principality to Vasily. Dmitry for the first time managed inseparably to identify the grand principality with Moscow by gaining recognition from the Tatars that the title of grand prince, along with the territories dependent on Vladimir, was a family possession.

Vasily I ( r. 1389-1425) continued to expand the grand principality by taking advantage of political strife in the Golden Horde. In 1392, Tokhtamysh's forces were defeated by Timur, and during a visit to the weakened khan's court, Vasily was given permission to take the throne of Nizhny Novgorod. In 1395, Timur led a large army and destroyed Tokhtamysh's forces in the North Caucasus. Timur then set about devastating Tokhtamysh's domains and turned his army towards Moscow. Vasily gathered an army, while Metropolitan Cyprian brought the Our Lady of Vladimir icon, but Timur stopped his advance and withdrew from Russian territory. Edigu drove Tokhtamysh into exile and came to dominate the steppe, but paid little attention to Moscow, instead focusing on Lithuania. As a result, Vasily stopped paying tribute and did not recognize the suzerainty of successive khans. However, in 1408, Edigu launched a devastating invasion and laid siege to Moscow, but the city managed to survive the attack. Edigu agreed to withdraw his forces on the condition that he would be paid a large indemnity. In 1410, Tatar raids led to the sacking of the old capital, Vladimir, and in 1412, Vasily went to the khan to renew his patent for the grand princely title. In Edigei's last years, the Horde was weakened by internal divisions, and by 1420, it would soon be replaced by successive khanates.

At the start of his reign, Vasily posed no threat to the ambitions of Vytautas and assumed the role of junior partner. Vasily married his daughter Sophia in 1391 and was able to enjoy his protection. When Vytautas captured the Smolensk principality in 1395, Vasily offered no resistance and accepted the Lithuanian annexation the following year. Vytautas allied himself with Tokhtamysh, but in 1399, their forces were defeated by Edigu in the Battle of the Vorskla River. In 1401, the people of Smolensk launched a revolt against Lithuanian rule and recalled their former prince, but Vasily stayed neutral and Vytautas reasserted his control three years later. However, Vytautas attempted to bring Pskov and Novgorod into the Lithuanian sphere of influence, and in 1406, Vytautas attacked Pskov. Vasily came to the aid of Pskov, leading to a border war between Lithuania and Moscow that lasted until Edigu's invasion two years later. In 1410, Vytautas joined Jogaila of Poland in defeating the Teutonic Knights in the Battle of Grunwald, and relations between Lithuania and Moscow resumed a more peaceful course, although the two continued to wrestle for influence in Pskov and Novgorod.

Growth of the Moscow principality from 1300 to 1462

Vasily II ( r. 1425-1462) succeeded his father at the age of ten, and in the early years of his reign, tensions within Moscow led to a civil war. Yury of Galich showed signs of ambition during the reign of his older brother, Vasily I. He consolidated his control of his share of the family inheritance, building up a solid base in the prosperous region of Galich and creating a new capital, Zvenigorod. As soon as his brother died, Yury challenged the succession of his nephew. Yury gathered an army, but Metropolitan Photius intervened, urging him to submit. Yury refused, but the people of Galich pressured him after the metropolitan withheld his blessing of Yury's subjects. Yury recognized Vasily as the grand prince in 1428, but following the death of Vasily's key allies, Photius and Vytautas, Yury claimed the throne again in 1431 with the support of the population of Galich and other areas in the north, including Vyatka. Vasily sent his representatives to the khan, Ulugh Muhammad, and was able to receive the patent for the grand princely throne. However, in 1433, Yury seized Moscow and Vasily was forced to recognize him as the grand prince and accept Kolomna as an appanage.

Many nobles refused to recognize Yury as grand prince, and with his support dwindling, he left Moscow. Yury once again seized Moscow in 1434 and was able to secure recognition from powerful figures such as the prince of Mozhaysk, but he died soon after and the princes of Galich could no longer claim the throne on legal grounds. Vasily Kosoy, Yury's eldest son, attempted to remain on the throne of Moscow, but his younger brothers rejected his claim and made peace with Vasily II. He left Moscow, but continued to fight a war of attrition from his base. Vasily II captured him in 1436 and had him blinded, bringing the first phase of the civil war to an end and allowing Vasily to address a crisis in the church. The metropolitan seat had remained vacant following the death of Photius, and a council of Russian bishops nominated a local bishop, Jonah, to succeed him, but when he was finally able to go to Constantinople, the patriarch had already appointed the Greek bishop Isidore. Shortly after arriving in Moscow, Isidore left for the Council of Florence. Isidore returned in 1441 and brought news of the union, but Vasily ordered his arrest for having it signed. The seat remained vacant, and as no replacement had been sent from Constantinople, a council of Russian bishops finally chose Jonah as metropolitan in 1448, which amounted to a declaration of autocephaly by the Russian Orthodox Church.

The pressure of his rivals forced Ulugh Muhammad to take refuge in Belyov. Vasily attempted to drive him out, but failed, and the khan was free to raid the southern frontiers of Moscow for several years. In 1444, he moved to either Gorodets or Nizhny Novgorod, and launched raids on the southeastern territories of Moscow. Vasily mobilized against him, but slowly due to Lithuanian attacks, and in 1445, Vasily was taken prisoner by Ulugh Muhammad. He was later released and forced to pay a large ransom. Upon Vasily's return to Moscow, a number of nobles joined a plot in installing Yury's son Dmitry Shemyaka on the throne, and after Vasily left for a pilgrimage, Shemyaka's forces seized Moscow in 1446. As resistance to Shemyaka grew, especially from the clergy, Vasily moved to Tver and received the support of its prince, Boris, on the agreement that Vasily's son Ivan would be married to his daughter, Maria of Tver. Vasily's army entered Moscow the same year unopposed with the support of most court nobles and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, in addition to the prince of Tver. Shemyaka abandoned Moscow but still offered resistance until Galich was captured by Vasily in 1450.

Eastern Europe at the time of Ivan III's death in 1505

Ivan III ( r. 1462-1505) succeeded his father and his reign has been considered to mark the end of the appanage period and the beginning of a new period in Russian history known as Muscovite Russia. At the start of Ivan's reign, Moscow was already the political and religious center of Russia, but Ivan vastly expanded the domain of the grand prince with the " gathering of the Russian lands". After Novgorod's boyar class turned to Lithuania for support, Ivan's army defeated the Novgorodian army in 1471, after which Ivan took an oath of allegiance from Novgorod, but left its system of government in place. After the Novgorodian authorities attempted to turn to Lithuania again, Ivan's army marched against the city in 1478 and the city surrendered. Ivan imposed his direct rule on the city and abolished its system of government. Tver offered even less resistance, and when Ivan launched a new campaign against Tver in 1485, its prince fled to Lithuania. Ivan incorporated other appanages into the grand principality, while other princes acknowledged him as their overlord. As a result, Ivan began to rule Russia as a unified monarchy.

Having consolidated the core of Russia under his rule, Ivan III became the first Muscovite ruler to use the title of tsar in his correspondence. He also adopted the title of sovereign of all Russia and competed with his powerful rival, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, for control over the Upper Oka Principalities. Through the defections of some princes, border skirmishes, and the long inconclusive Russo-Lithuanian Wars that ended only in 1503, Ivan III was able to push westward, and the Moscow state tripled in size under his rule.[citation needed ]

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Vasily III ( r. 1505-1533) continued his father's policy of adding the remaining Russian territories. He annexed Pskov and Ryazan in 1510 and 1521, respectively. Smolensk, the last ethnographically Russian territory, remained under the control of Lithuania until a war with Lithuania led to Vasily capturing Smolensk in 1514. A peace treaty in 1522 confirmed Moscow's gains. For the next century, the border with Poland-Lithuania remained stable. Vasily also advanced the Russian border in the east and supported the pro-Russian party in the Khanate of Kazan.

Vasily married Solomonia Saburova but produced no children, leading him to marry Elena Glinskaya from the Glinsky family in 1526. She gave birth to Ivan in 1530, but Vasily's untimely death in 1533 led to Elena becoming regent and ruling with a handful of prominent boyars. Powerful boyar clans, including the Belskys, Glinskys, Obolenskys and Shuyskys, competed against each other for influence. Following Elena's death in 1538, the young Ivan married Anastasia Romanovna in 1547 and was crowned as not only grand prince, but also the tsar of Russia.

Ivan I ( r. 1325-1340) stressed the unity of the ruling house of Moscow and its lands, and as a result, he ensured that the family's lands remained the collective property of all members while giving each one of his heirs a share of the inheritance. Simeon ( r. 1340-1353) made a treaty with his brothers, in which the younger members of the house recognized Simeon as their leader and were obligated to follow him in his military campaigns in exchange for Simeon consulting his brothers on important state affairs. As a result, each brother had inviolable possession of his appanage, which he could administer autonomously and pass on to his direct heir.

Due to the increasing fragmentation of Moscow, the ruling house under Dmitry Donskoy ( r. 1359-1389) distinguished between patrimonial possessions of the entire family, which could be divided into appanages held as a temporary trust, and patrimonial possessions known as that belonged to individual members or branches. In the treaties between Dmitry and his cousin Vladimir of Serpukhov, the former recognized the latter's right to hold the lands inherited from his father. At this point, the Moscow principality consisted of two autonomous subdivisions with two capitals, while the principality remained a single unit of which Dmitry was the head.

In Vasily II's final years ( r. 1425-1462), only the appanage principality of Vereya remained. In his will, Vasily II created four more appanages for his younger sons. Ivan III ( r. 1462-1505) sought to consolidate the lands of his younger brothers into his domain whenever possible. He insisted that any appanage prince who died would have his appanage reverted to the crown in its entirety. In Ivan III's final years, only one of the original five appanage principalities remained. In his will, he created four new appanages for all of his younger sons, and as a result, his eldest son Vasily III ( r. 1505-1533) faced five appanage princes, one of whom was his cousin, given Volok Lamsky. Vasily III prevented his younger brothers from marrying until he had sons of his own, and so by the time of his death, only one appanage principality remained.

In the 16th century, appanage princes held significant power over their subjects, including the right to collect taxes and administer low justice. They also inherited a tradition of family solidarity, meaning the grand prince was expected to consult them on matters of war and peace. When an appanage prince died, the survivors were typically entitled to inherit a share of the deceased's lands. Although some historians have viewed them as opponents to the power of the grand prince, the appanages were created by him, and by the late 15th century, many of these appanage principalities reverted to the crown upon the prince's death, despite being theoretically held in hereditary tenure. Appanage princes also had their own courts and commanded their own armies, and as such, were expected to contribute to the defense of the country. However, the court and the army of the grand prince was significantly larger.

The Dormition Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin

The 1488 Hungarian legation in the court of Ivan III, early 16th century

The unification of Russia gave rise to a new political system characterized by the dominance of the grand prince, who viewed the country as his personal patrimony. The historian Sergey Platonov wrote: "The authority of the Moscow princes took on the character of the authority of a lord of the manor over its land and people... The prince was not only the ruler of the country; he was also its owner". During the appanage period, princes and their retinues played a major administrative and social role in their principalities; however, with the rise of the grand principality of Moscow, the role of those princes were subordinated to the grand prince and the emerging state apparatus. Traditional institutions like the were abolished, and appanage princes were incorporated into the boyar class. As a result, they became increasingly part of the service class. Some historians have argued that a ruling class, which included the grand prince and leading boyars, governed the country by consultation and consensus-building. Nancy Shields Kollmann in particular called it the "façade of autocracy" and applied the term to later Muscovite history.

The absorption of large amounts of territory led both Ivan III ( r. 1462-1505) and Vasily III ( r. 1505-1533) to strengthen the system of administration. Previously, the household of the grand prince managed what would be considered the affairs of the state, as well as the private and family business of the grand prince. To meet increasing demands, a small bureaucracy was established with state secretaries known as . The process of separating state affairs was slow, with most of the dyaki under Vasily III working in the management of the royal estates. The dyaki were also chosen based on skill and historian Aleksandr Zimin identified more than 200 during the reigns of Ivan III and Vasily III. While provincial administrations managed their limited resources efficiently, domestic tariffs divided regions and local tradition was strong in many areas. For example, some continued to use their own systems for measuring land. The city of Novgorod also maintained its own distinct currency and local political life continued the traditions of the republic in many ways.

Like previous rulers, both Ivan III and Vasily III chose nobles from their court to serve as governors in other towns or regions. These namestniki and volosteli had to maintain order and were tasked with organizing the defense of the territory. Ivan III and Vasily III often chose courtiers to serve as governors, but in times of civil strife, they sometimes sent a member of their inner circle to serve as governor, especially if the town or region was of strategic importance. Governors usually served for a maximum of one or two years before returning to Moscow. As the state's needs grew more complex, the office of gorodovoy prikazchik was established during the reign of Vasily III to handle some of the functions of the governor, such as tax collection and maintaining order. As the central government's authority was filtered through other institutions and jurisdictions, the royal administration had only limited control over large regions. Ivan IV tried different methods to increase his effective control over all regions, but it was not until the 17th century that this was resolved.

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Obverse of Ivan III's seal, later identified as Saint George slaying the dragon, 1497.

Relations between Moscow and the Golden Horde varied at times. In the last two decades of the 13th century, Moscow gained the support of one of the rivaling Mongol statesmen, Nogai, against the principalities that were oriented towards the khan. After the restoration of unity in the Golden Horde in the early 14th century, Moscow generally enjoyed the favor of the khan until 1317 and 1322-1327. For the following thirty years, when relations between the two parties improved, Moscow was able to achieve sufficient economic and political potential. Further attempts to deprive its rulers of the status of grand prince were unsuccessful after the Horde sank into internecine war and proved to be fruitless during the reign of a relatively powerful khan such as Mamai, whereas Tokhtamysh had no other choice but to recognize the supremacy of Moscow over the Russian principalities. The traditional divide and conquer strategy of the Mongols failed, and the following period is characterized by a lack of support from the Horde.

Although Moscow recognized the khan as its suzerain in the early years of the "Tatar yoke", despite certain acts of resistance and disobedience, it refused to acknowledge the khan's suzerainty in 1374-1380, 1396-1411, 1414-1416 and 1417-1419, even despite the growing power of the Golden Horde. The power of the Horde over Moscow was greatly limited during the reign of Dmitry Donskoy, who gained recognition of the grand principality of Vladimir as a hereditary possession of the princes of Moscow; while the Horde continued to collect tribute, it could no longer have a serious impact on the internal structure of Russia. During the reigns of Vasily II and Ivan III, the Moscow grand principality adopted the ideology of an Orthodox tsardom after the fall of Constantinople, which was incompatible with the recognition of suzerainty of the khan, and as a result, the grand prince began to declare the independence of Moscow in diplomatic relations with other countries. This process was complete during the reign of Ivan III.

The Vision to the Youth Bartholomew, painting by Mikhail Nesterov, 1889-1890

In the centuries following the Mongol conquest, there was a revival and flourishing of monasticism, which became the most significant development in the life of the Russian Church. Between the 14th and 16th centuries, monasticism spread in an unprecedented manner. One estimate suggests around 250 cenobitic monasteries and convents were founded during this period, many in remote corners of the Muscovite realm. Sergius of Radonezh was both the driving force and the embodiment of the monastic revival. Around 1354, he adopted a monastic rule that turned his followers into a fully communal, cenobitic organization, later known as the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius. The teachings of Sergius inspired many of his followers to found their own communities. The Andronikov, Simonov and Chudov Monasteries were founded in Moscow and its environs, while others were founded in remote areas of the Russian North, such as the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery near Beloozero and the Solovetsky Monastery on the island of Solovetsky in the White Sea.

This monastic revival inspired the church to renew its missionary work and continue converting all peoples, whether Slavic or not, to Orthodox Christianity. Towards the end of the 14th century, Stephen of Perm moved into the territory of the Komi peoples in the northeastern corner of European Russia, where his teachings and acts of charity won him many converts. He invented the Permic script and began translating scriptures and other writings; his efforts have helped the Komi remain Orthodox to this day. Following the death of Sergius, the Trinity Lavra acquired huge estates and became extremely influential. By the end of the 16th century, it owned a total of 240,000 hectares (590,000 acres) of arable land. The Muscovite government gradually transformed the monasteries into fortresses. Even those far from the frontiers were heavily fortified, such as the Trinity Lavra, as they were intended to serve as places of refuge and military garrisons. The monastic communities came to socially dominate entire regions of the country, with only larger towns rivaling them as centers of social activity.

Although Russian heretics were few in number, their intelligence made them disproportionately influential. At the time of Moscow's annexation of Novgorod, a new movement emerged and was given the pejorative label of Judaizers. According to Joseph Volotsky, in 1471, a Jew arrived in Novgorod and began converting some of the locals to Judaism. Most modern scholars have rejected this version of events, but it is known that there was a struggle between Archbishop Gennady of Novgorod and some of the local priests and their followers. This heresy later spread to the court of Ivan III ( r. 1462-1505) in the mid-1480s after diplomat Fyodor Kuritsyn returned from Hungary. Like the strigolniki before them, the Judaizers rejected the authority of the hierarchy and embraced iconoclasm. Ivan refused to crush them until 1504, when a church council condemned the remaining Judaizers as heretics and Ivan sent them to the stake.

The sobor (church council) of 1490, miniature from the Illustrated Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible

During the reign of Ivan III, two factions within the Russian Church contended for influence. Joseph Volotsky led the faction that supported the right of monasteries to own land, while the non-possessors, led by Nil Sorsky, opposed monastic landholding. Ivan viewed the system as an ideal way to provide for the noble cavalrymen who served in the army, but the vast landholdings of the church prevented him from extending this system to the rest of his realm. As a result, the non-possessors were natural allies of Ivan. In the (church council) of 1503, which was called to deal with the issues of church discipline, a compromise was reached whereby church lands would not be systematically confiscated; however, some scholars have argued that there is a lack of concrete evidence that this sobor discussed monastic landholding. Given that the government held significant amounts of crown land in the central regions, the government felt little pressure to confiscate monastic lands.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 was viewed by the Russians as divine punishment for apostasy, with subsequent writings referring to Vasily II ( r. 1425-1462) as "the God-chosen... God-crowned tsar of Orthodoxy and of all Russia". The unilateral decision of Vasily II and the Russian bishops to install Jonah as metropolitan in 1448 was later justified by arguing that the fall of the Byzantine Empire had left the Orthodox world without an emperor, while the patriarch was incapacitated. This decision allowed for the creation of a separate metropolitanate in Lithuania during the reign of Casimir IV Jagiellon, with Jonah being unable to assert his authority there. Ivan III often presented himself as the Orthodox emperor, or tsar, in his diplomatic correspondence, and so the campaign to gain recognition as equals from the Habsburg emperors was a high priority. In the year 1492 (AM 7000), Metropolitan Zosimus speculated on Russia's role in the world and was thus the first to call Moscow an imperial city. Archbishop Gennady of Novgorod commissioned a complete Slavonic translation of the Bible, known as Gennady's Bible, which led to the creation of a byproduct: a composition known as The Legend of the White Cowl, which elaborated on the doctrine of the transfer of empire.

The vast majority of the population were peasants. The peasants' primary allegiance was to the commune. Although little information exists on the structure of peasant communes before the 16th century, historians believe that, by that time, the commune already had a very long history and deep roots. The peasants of either a district, village or several hamlets chose elders who would represent them through the commune. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Muscovite government viewed the commune as a useful tool in governing the realm. For instance, the commune's members were collectively responsible for paying taxes, and therefore if one household failed to pay its share, then the others had to pay what was owed. Therefore, administrative ordinances recognized the traditional functions of the commune and used them to suit the needs of officials.

Over the centuries, peasant land increasingly passed into the hands of nobles and monasteries. Although the peasants continued to farm the land, they were now required to pay dues to the lord. These dues sometimes included the peasants giving their lord a small amount of money and specified amounts of rye, oats, butter, and other products. In other cases, peasants were obligated to provide a range of services, such as cultivating the fields of monks or baking their bread. By the end of the 15th century, monetary payments had become a regular part of these obligations. Throughout the 16th century, these demands appear to have risen. The peasants retained considerable leverage, such as the ability to leave their lord's manor. From the mid-15th century, Muscovite law also specified that peasants could legally move during the two weeks surrounding George's Day in Autumn, provided that they had fulfilled their obligations and settled any debt. By the end of the 15th century, the government had imposed a wide range of demands, including paying taxes, fees, and the provision of goods and services.

The other main class was the nobility. Their primary role was to serve as warriors, and as a result, nobles made up the retinue of ruling princes and armies. At the beginning of the 14th century, like other ruling princes, the prince of Moscow had his own force of military retainers. The grand prince of Vladimir was the suzerain of all the princes, and so in emergencies, he could summon the princes and their warriors to defend the country. In practice, the prince could choose whether to participate in such campaigns. As the Muscovite prince annexed other principalities, he brought the nobles there into his service. Some came to Moscow to serve in his court, while others were allowed to serve from their ancestral homeland. By the end of the 15th century, as the grand prince of Moscow became the undisputed leader of the nation, he forbade the right of departure and expected warriors to appear when summoned. Despite most nobles owning land in absolute tenure, known as , the grand prince had no qualms about confiscating them for acts of disloyalty.

During the reign of Ivan III ( r. 1462-1505), the basic structure of the warrior nobility became more defined. At the top were the boyars as they commanded the armies and served as advisors. Below them was an equally small group of families whose members served as governors of various provinces and in other roles, including in battle. Beneath them were lesser members of the entourage, who guarded the grand prince and formed the core of his army. The majority of the warrior nobility lived on their estates and would appear when summoned, alongside the other nobles from their region. At the same time, the Muscovite army became a highly effective fighting force, drawing on centuries of experience battling mounted warriors from the steppe. As a result, Russian warriors prioritized speed and mobility, opting for light chain mail and primarily using bows and swords.

In the 15th century, following the disintegration of the Golden Horde, Muscovite merchants began trading directly with Crimea, including with the Genoese in Caffa. A distinct merchant group known as the gosti-surozhane emerged, likely composed of native Russians, who specialized in trading with Crimea. Merchants from abroad, including Armenians and Genoese, came to Moscow via Crimea. Around the same time, the city of Kazan replaced Bolghar as the focal point of trade on the river. The annual fair in Kazan attracted many merchants from abroad, including Russians. The Nogai Horde also played an important role in the Muscovite economy by supplying the army with horses. By the 16th century, 20,000 horses were driven to markets in Moscow each year.

Since early times, the city of Novgorod served as the intermediary between other Russian cities and northwestern Europe. Furs were the main commodity for export and Novgorod worked to control the supply of the highest quality furs. By the 15th century, the commercial power of the Hanseatic League had waned, and in 1494, Ivan III ordered the closure of the Hanseatic in Novgorod, known as the Peterhof. Ivan sought to open as many outlets for foreign trade as possible, which included his fortress of Ivangorod in the Baltic. Although the kontor in Novgorod was briefly re-opened in 1514, the Hanseatic League never regained its former monopoly, while Russia's Baltic trade continued with increased flexibility.

Early in their history, Russian towns often served as the capital of an independent principality. During the period of centralization, these towns became regional centers of the royal administration. Other towns close to the frontiers primarily served as military outposts. Many townsmen were artisans who worked with metal, wood, leather and other materials to produce a variety of goods. These were often made for local consumption as Russian artisans had little contact with wider markets. During times of war, some specialized in producing chain mail, cannons or handguns. The main products in long-range internal trade were regional specialties from the countryside, such as fish and salt.

Muscovite Russia was culturally influenced by Slavic and Byzantine cultural elements. In Muscovite Russia, supernaturalism was a fundamental part of daily life.

The Trinity, icon by Andrei Rublev, early 15th century

A distinct school of icon painting was formed in Moscow in the second half of the 14th century, and would be led by Andrei Rublev, one of the most celebrated Russian icon painters. Among his most notable works is The Trinity, which dates to the early 15th century. The first original Russian school, the Suzdal school, was merged with the Moscow school in the early 15th century. Igor Grabar said it could be distinguished by "a general tone, which is always cool, silvery, in contrast to Novgorodian painting which inevitably tends towards the warm, the yellowish, the golden". Dionisius continued the traditions of Andrei Rublev and the Moscow school at the turn of the 16th century. The art of the miniature in illuminated manuscripts also continued to develop in Moscow, with manuscripts like the Khitrovo Gospels containing rich illustrations.

The Moscow architectural school, which extended to the smaller principalities that were incorporated, evolved steadily throughout the 15th century. In smaller towns, a more distinct type of church emerged, one that returned to the Vladimir school. A group of cathedrals built at the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th century exemplifies the "early Moscow style" that preceded the arrival of Renaissance craftsmen. These include the Cathedral of the Dormition in Zvenigorod (1396-1398), the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin in the Savvino-Storozhevsky Monastery (1405-1408), and the Cathedral of the Trinity in the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius ( c. 1422). Scholars of Moscow's architectural history have emphasized that the traditions of a number of Russian principalities were integrated into a unified system in the early 15th century. The Cathedral of the Savior in the Andronikov Monastery (1425-1427) is often cited as the main example of this.

The late 15th century marked a significant period for masonry architecture, with many new masonry buildings appearing in the Moscow Kremlin and in other parts of Moscow. Eight new churches were built within the Kremlin itself. Brick began to replace the previously used limestone ("white stone"), likely under the influence of brick architecture in northern Germany's coastal towns, with which Novgorod had trade connections. It is believed that that a group of Novgorodian masters worked in Moscow and introduced new techniques. Following the end of Mongol suzerainty, Ivan III transformed Russian architectural style after contacts with Italian cities were restored, introducing new features that were preserved throughout the following centuries. Italian Renaissance masters worked in Russia from 1475 to 1539. The career of Aristotele Fioravanti is considered to be evidence that Moscow attracted leading Italian masters. The Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin (1475-1479) reflects the spirit of early Vladimir and Fioravanti used the Dormition Cathedral in Vladimir, a symbol of the center of the Russian Church, as his model while introducing new influences at the same time.

In the 14th century, South Slavic clerks revised the Church Slavonic texts in scriptures and liturgies to align them more closely to the original Greek texts; this variation of Church Slavonic became the literary language of Muscovite Russia. Although Church Slavonic was used as the literary language, princely administrative offices used a more vernacularized form of writing. In the 15th century, Bulgarian and Serbian clerics who came to Russia following the Ottoman conquests of their countries brought with them a new style of writing. This new style was chiefly expressed in hagiography, characterized by a disregard for concrete detail and a preference for generalization of the subject. The Life of St. Stephen of Perm by Epiphanius the Wise became the type of such writings for the following centuries. Due to South Slavic influence, a more formal and rigid standard of Church Slavonic replaced the strongly vernacularized language of the 13th and 14th centuries.

Metropolitan Cyprian () played a significant role in influencing the rise of Moscow as the new center of Russian culture. He actively contributed to promoting the spread of hesychast theology in Russia by translating texts that supported its teachings. He also worked to align Russian liturgical practices more closely with those of Byzantine tradition. In the years leading up to his death, Cyprian contributed to the creation of the first comprehensive Moscow chronicle, which was completed in 1408. As a writer, his notable works include two versions of the Life of Metropolitan Peter. These versions were based on an earlier account commissioned by Ivan I of Moscow in 1327 to commemorate Metropolitan Peter's relocation of the seat of the church from Vladimir to Moscow. The expanded version is widely considered to be the first example in old Russian hagiography of a new hagiographical style.

After the defeat of the Tatars in the Battle of Kulikovo, heroic accounts of the battle were written with considerable artistry, including The Tale of the Battle with Mamai and Zadonshchina. The latter crafted a proto-national myth about the need for unification against foreign enemies: "Let us lay down our lives for the Russian land and the Christian faith". In the Muscovite period, there was a local tradition of historical narratives focused on isolated military events, one example being The Story of the Taking of Pskov (1510), which D. S. Mirsky referred to as "one of the most beautiful 'short stories' of Old Russia".

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the independence of the Russian Church led to the development of the idea that the grand princes of Moscow, or tsars, were the legitimate heirs of the Byzantine Empire, as expressed in several pseudo-historical works from the reigns of Ivan III and Vasily III. The Tale on the Taking of Tsargrad by Nestor Iskander was one of the most popular, with its final part mentioning a Greek legend of a "fair people" ( rusy rod), which was later interpreted to mean the Russians ( russky rod), being destined to free Constantinople. A related idea is expressed in the Epistle on the Crown of Monomakh and The Tale of the Princes of Vladimir, which trace the genealogy of the grand princes back to the Roman emperor Augustus. After Ivan IV was crowned as tsar in 1547, official literature became marked by an encyclopedic approach, reflecting the political centralization and unification of the country.

1. ^ Taagepera, Rein (September 1997). "Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities: Context for Russia" (PDF). International Studies Quarterly. 41 (3): 498. doi:10.1111/0020-8833.00053. JSTOR 2600793. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-07-07.

2. ^ Dukes 1998, p. 42, "By the accession of Ivan III in 1462, Moscow had become the political as well as the religious centre of the Russian lands. A considerable amount of ingathering remained to be accomplished... Ivan III's reign marks 'an important stage' in this process"; Riasanovsky & Steinberg 2019, pp. 77-79, "Under Ivan III 'the gathering of Russia' proceeded apace... All in all, Ivan III's successes in other Russian states and in foreign wars enormously increased his domain... Ivan III has been called the first national Russian sovereign"; Wickham 2016, p. 184; Ziegler 2009, p. 24; Kuchkin 2013, p. 310, "После успешного похода на Новгород (1477-78)... Иван III Васильевич стал официально титуловаться 'великим князем всея Руси'. М. в. к. трансформировалось в Рус. гос-во".

3. ^ Riasanovsky & Steinberg 2019, p. 79; Dukes 1998, p. 45; Wickham 2016, p. 184, "... Ivan III (1462-1505) and his successor Vasiliy III had taken over every other independent Russian principality"; Ziegler 2009, p. 24, "Vasili III... continued the process of consolidation, expansion, and centralization pursued by his father".

4. ^ "ЗАДОНЩИНА". Medieval Russian Literature (in Russian). Translated by L. A. Dmitriev. Archived from the original on 2016-09-11.

5. Routledge Library Editions: Political Geography. Routledge. 23 June 2021. p. 349. ISBN 978-1-317-60078-7. Etymologically rossiiskii and Rossiia are Russified versions of the Latin (or Greek) words for Russian and Russia.

6. ^ Obolensky, Dimitri (1971). "Commentary on the ninth chapter of Constantine Porphyrogenitus' De Administrando lmperio". Byzantium and the Slavs: Collected Studies. Variorum Reprints. p. 20. ISBN 978-0-902089-14-3. Later, the term Ρωσία was borrowed by the Russians, in the form Rosiya, from the terminology used by the Byzantine Patriarchate.

7. ^ Sashalmi 2022, p. 66, "The Latinized version of the title... resulted in the appearance of the term Russiia/Rossiia"; Bushkovitch 2011, p. 37, Precisely at this time in written usage the modern term Rossia (a literary expression borrowed from Greek) began to edge out the traditional and vernacular Rus"; Hellberg-Hirn 2019, p. 54, "In Russian historical sources, from the end of the 15th century onwards, the word Rossiia (Russia) is occasionally used..."; Kloss 2012, p. 13.

8. ^ Pape, Carsten (2016). "Titul Ivana III po datskim istochnikam pozdnego Srednevekov'ya" Титул Ивана III по датским источникам позднего Средневековья [The title of Ivan III according to late-medieval Danish sources]. Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana (in Russian). 20 (2). St. Petersburg: 65-75. doi:10.21638/11701/spbu19.2016.205. Archived from the original on 2023-05-29.

9. Хорошкевич, А. Л. (1976). "Россия и Московия: Из истории политико-географической терминологии" [Khoroshkevich A. L. Russia and Muscovy: from the history of politico-geographic terminology]. Acta Baltico-Slavica. X: 47-57.

10. ^ Trepanier, Lee (2010). "2: Muscovite Russia (ca. 1240 - ca. 1505)". Political Symbols in Russian History: Church, State, and the Quest for Order and Justice. G - Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series. Lanhan, Maryland: Lexington Books. p. 31. ISBN 9780739117897. But the crucial year was 1326, when [Metropolitan] Peter became a resident of Moscow and began to build his burial vault. On December 20, 1326, Metropolitan Peter died and was buried by one of the bishops in the presence of Ivan I. Due to his residency and burial place, Metropolitan Peter had confirmed Moscow the future haven of the Russian Orthodox Church, although this official transfer would not take place until the reign of Alexis.

11. Trepanier, L. ^ Political Symbols in Russian History: Church, State, and the Quest for Order and Justice. Lexington Books. 2010. p. 39

12. Gorskij, A.A. (2000). Moskva i Orda (in Russian) (Naučnoe izd. ed.). Moskva: Nauka. pp. 188-189. ISBN 978-5-02-010202-6. Archived from the original on 16 July 2019.

13. ^ Gorskij, A.A. (2000). Moskva i Orda (in Russian) (Naučnoe izd. ed.). Moskva: Nauka. p. 189. ISBN 978-5-02-010202-6. Archived from the original on 16 July 2019.

14. ^ Gorskij, A.A. (2000). Moskva i Orda (in Russian) (Naučnoe izd. ed.). Moskva: Nauka. p. 188. ISBN 978-5-02-010202-6. Archived from the original on 16 July 2019.

15. ^ Wigzell, Faith (2010-01-31). "Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene (eds). Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars". Folklorica. 9 (2): 169-171. doi:10.17161/folklorica.v9i2.3754. ISSN 1920-0242.

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Grand Principality of Moscow - Wikipedia

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The Grand Principality of Moscow, or Muscovy, known as the Principality of Moscow until 1389, was a late medieval Russian monarchy. Its capital was the city of Moscow. Originally established as a minor principality in the 13th century, the grand principality was transformed into a centralized Russian state in the late 15th century.

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The Tsardom of Russia, also known as the Tsardom of Muscovy, was the centralized Russian state from the assumption of the title of tsar by Ivan IV in 1547 until the foundation of the Russian Empire by Peter the Great in 1721.

From 1550 to 1700, Russia grew by an average of 35,000 square kilometres (14,000 sq mi) per year. The period includes the upheavals of the transition from the Rurik to the Romanov dynasties, wars with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian conquest of Siberia, to the reign of Peter the Great, who took power in 1689 and transformed the tsardom into an empire. During the Great Northern War, he implemented substantial reforms and proclaimed the Russian Empire after victory over Sweden in 1721.

While the oldest endonyms of the Grand Duchy of Moscow used in its documents were "Rus'" () and the "Russian land" (Русская земля , Russkaya zemlya), a new form of its name in Russian became common by the 15th century. The vernacular was transformed into Rus(s)iya or Ros(s)iya (based on the Greek name for Rus'). In the 1480s, Russian state scribes Ivan Cherny and Mikhail Medovartsev mention Russia under the name ( Rosia), and Medovartsev also mentions the sceptre "of Russian lordship" (Росийскаго господства , Rus' and appeared in an inscription on the western Rosiyskago gospodstva). In the following century, the new forms co-existed with portal of the Transfiguration Cathedral of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery in Yaroslavl (1515), on the icon case of the Theotokos of Vladimir (1514), in the work by Maximus the Greek, the Russian Chronograph written by Dosifei Toporkov (died 1543 or 1544) in 1516-1522, and in other sources.

On 16 January 1547, Ivan IV was crowned the tsar and grand prince of all Russia (Царь и Великий князь всея Руси , Tsar i Velikiy knyaz vseya Rusi), thereby proclaiming the Tsardom of Russia, or "the Great Russian Tsardom", as it was called in the coronation document, by Constantinople Patriarch Jeremiah II, and in numerous official texts. The formula in manuscripts "to all his state of Great Russia" later replaced those found in other manuscripts - "to all the Russian realm" ( vo vse Rossisskoe tsarstvo); the former is more typical of the 17th century, when the usage of the term " Great Russia" ( Velikaya Rossiya) became widely established. By the 17th century, the form Rossiya replaced Rus' to describe the extent of the tsar's imperial authority in chiny, with Feodor III using the term "Great Russian Tsardom" ( Velikorossisskoe tsarstvie) to denote an imperial and absolutist state, subordinating both Russian and non-Russian territories. The old name Rus' was replaced in official documents, though the names and Russian land were still common and synonymous to it.

The Russian state partly remained referred to as Moscovia (English: ) throughout Europe, predominantly in its Catholic part, though this Latin term was never used in Russia. The two names Russia and Moscovia appear to have co-existed as interchangeable during the late 16th century and throughout the 17th century with different Western maps and sources using different names, so that the country was called "Russia, or Moscovia" ( Latin: Russia seu Moscovia) or "Russia, popularly known as Moscovia" ( Latin: Russia vulgo Moscovia). In England in the 16th century, it was known both as Russia and Muscovy. Such notable Englishmen as Giles Fletcher, author of the book Of the Russe Common Wealth (1591), and Samuel Collins, author of The Present State of Russia (1668), both of whom visited Russia, were familiar with the term Russia and used it in their works. So did numerous other authors, including John Milton, who wrote A brief history of Moscovia and of other less-known countries lying eastward of Russia, published posthumously, starting it with the words: "The Empire of Moscovia, or as others call it, Russia...".

According to prominent historians like Alexander Zimin and Anna Khoroshkevich, the continuous use of the term Moscovia was a result of traditional habit and the need to distinguish between the Muscovite and the Lithuanian part of Rus', as well as of the political interests of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which competed with Moscow for the western regions of Rus'. Due to the propaganda of the Commonwealth, as well as of the Jesuits, the term Moscovia was used instead of Russia in many parts of Europe where prior to the reign of Peter the Great there was a lack of direct knowledge of the country. In Northern Europe and at the court of the Holy Roman Empire, however, the country was known under its own name, Russia or Rossia. Sigismund von Herberstein, ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor in Russia, used both Russia and Moscovia in his work on the Russian tsardom and noted: "The majority believes that Russia is a changed name of Roxolania. Muscovites ("Russians" in the German version) refute this, saying that their country was originally called Russia (Rosseia)". Pointing to the difference between Latin and Russian names, French captain Jacques Margeret, who served in Russia and left a detailed description of L'Empire de Russie of the early 17th century that was presented to King Henry IV, stated that foreigners make "a mistake when they call them Muscovites and not Russians. When they are asked what nation they are, they respond 'Russac', which means 'Russians', and when they are asked what place they are from, the answer is Moscow, Vologda, Ryasan and other cities". The closest analogue of the Latin term Moscovia in Russia was "Tsardom of Moscow", or "Moscow Tsardom" (Московское царство , Moskovskoye tsarstvo), which was used along with the name "Russia", sometimes in one sentence, as in the name of the 17th century Russian work On the Great and Glorious Russian Moscow State (О великом и славном Российском Московском государстве , O velikom i slavnom Rossiyskom Moskovskom gosudarstve).

Byzantine heritage

Ivory throne of Ivan IV of Russia

By the 16th century, the Russian ruler had emerged as a powerful, autocratic figure, a Tsar. By assuming that title, the sovereign of Moscow tried to emphasize that he was a major ruler or emperor ( tsar () represents the Slavic adaptation of the Roman Imperial title/name ) on a par with the Byzantine emperor. Indeed, after Ivan III married Sophia Palaiologina, the niece of the late Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, in 1472, the Moscow court adopted Byzantine terms, rituals, titles, and emblems such as the double-headed eagle, which survives in the coat of arms of Russia.

At first, the Byzantine term autokrator expressed only the literal meaning of an independent ruler, but in the reign of Ivan IV (1533-1584) it came to imply unlimited ( autocratic) rule. In 1547 the Grand Duke Ivan IV was crowned Tsar and thus was recognized - at least by the Russian Orthodox Church - as Emperor. Notably, the hegumen Philotheus of Pskov claimed in 1510 that after Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, the Russian tsar remained the only legitimate Orthodox ruler, and that Moscow was the Third Rome, becoming the final lineal successor to Rome and Constantinople; these were the two centers of Christianity and of the Roman empires ( Western and Eastern) of earlier periods. The "Third Rome" concept would resonate in the self-image of the Russian people in future centuries.

Early reign of Ivan IV

The development of the Tsar's autocratic powers reached a peak during the reign of Ivan IV, and he gained the sobriquet "Grozny". The English word terrible is usually used to translate the Russian word grozny in Ivan's nickname, but this is a somewhat archaic translation. The Russian word grozny reflects the older English usage of terrible as in "inspiring fear or terror; dangerous; powerful; formidable". It does not convey the more modern connotations of English terrible, such as "defective" or "evil". Vladimir Dal defined grozny specifically in archaic usage and as an epithet for tsars: "Courageous, magnificent, magisterial and keeping enemies in fear, but people in obedience". Other translations have also been suggested by modern scholars.

Foreign policies of Ivan IV

Ivan the Great Bell Tower, raised to the present height during the reign of Boris Godunov

Muscovy remained a fairly unknown society in Western Europe until Baron Sigismund von Herberstein published his Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (literally Notes on Muscovite Affairs) in 1549. This provided a broad view of what had been a rarely visited and poorly reported state. In the 1630s, the Russian Tsardom was visited by Adam Olearius, whose lively and well-informed writings were soon translated into all the major languages of Europe.

Mounted archers of Muscovy

Further information about Russia was circulated by English and Dutch merchants. One of them, Richard Chancellor, sailed to the White Sea in 1553 and continued overland to Moscow. Upon his return to England, the Muscovy Company was formed by himself, Sebastian Cabot, Sir Hugh Willoughby, and several London merchants. Ivan IV used these merchants to exchange letters with Elizabeth I.

Despite the domestic turmoil of the 1530s and 1540s, Russia continued to wage wars and to expand. It grew from 2.8 to 5.4 million square kilometers from 1533 to 1584. Ivan defeated and annexed the Khanate of Kazan on the middle Volga in 1552 and later the Astrakhan Khanate, where the Volga meets the Caspian Sea. These victories transformed Russia into a multiethnic and multiconfessional state, which it continues to be today. The tsar now controlled the entire Volga River and gained access to Central Asia.

Hoping to make profit from Russia's concentration on Livonian affairs, Devlet I Giray of Crimea, accompanied by as many as 120,000 horsemen, repeatedly devastated the Moscow region, until the Battle of Molodi put a stop to such northward incursions. But for decades to come, the southern borderland was annually pillaged by the Nogai Horde and the Crimean Khanate, who took local inhabitants with them as slaves. Tens of thousands of soldiers protected the Great Abatis Belt - a burden for a state whose social and economic development was stagnating.

Late reign of Ivan IV and oprichnina

The Apostle (1564) by Ivan Fyodorov and Pyotr Mstislavets, one of the first Russian printed books

As a result of the policies of the oprichnina, Ivan broke the economic and political power of the leading boyar families, thereby destroying precisely those persons who had built up Russia and were the most capable of administering it. Trade diminished, and peasants, faced with mounting taxes and threats of violence, began to leave Russia. Efforts to curtail the mobility of the peasants by tying them to their land brought Russia closer to legal serfdom. In 1572, Ivan finally abandoned the practices of the oprichnina.

According to a popular theory,[citation needed ][by whom? ] the oprichnina was started by Ivan in order to mobilize resources for the wars and to quell opposition. Regardless of the reason, Ivan's domestic and foreign policies had a devastating effect on Russia and led to a period of social struggle and civil war, the Time of Troubles ( Smutnoye vremya, 1598-1613).

Time of Troubles

In 1598, Feodor died without an heir, ending the Rurik Dynasty. Boris Godunov then convened a Zemsky Sobor, a national assembly of boyars, church officials, and commoners, which proclaimed him tsar, although various boyar factions refused to recognize the decision. Widespread crop failures caused the Russian famine of 1601-1603, and during the ensuing discontent, a man emerged who claimed to be Tsarevich Demetrius, Ivan IV's son who had died in 1591. This pretender to the throne, who came to be known as False Dmitriy I, gained support in Poland and marched to Moscow, gathering followers among the boyars and other elements as he went. Historians speculate that Godunov would have weathered this crisis had he not died in 1605. As a result, False Dmitriy I entered Moscow and was crowned tsar that year, following the murder of Tsar Feodor II, Godunov's son.

Subsequently, Russia entered a period of continuous chaos, known as The Time of Troubles (Смутное Время). Despite the Tsar's persecution of the boyars, the townspeople's dissatisfaction, and the gradual enserfment of the peasantry, efforts at restricting the power of the Tsar were only halfhearted. Finding no institutional alternative to the autocracy, discontented Russians rallied behind various pretenders to the throne. During that period, the goal of political activity was to gain influence over the sitting autocrat or to place one's own candidate on the throne. The boyars fought among themselves, the lower classes revolted blindly, and foreign armies occupied the Kremlin in Moscow, prompting many to accept Tsarist autocracy as a necessary means to restoring order and unity in Russia.

The Poles surrender the Moscow Kremlin to Prince Pozharsky in 1612. Painting by Ernst Lissner.

In 1609, Poland intervened into Russian affairs officially, captured Shuisky, and occupied the Kremlin. A group of Russian boyars signed in 1610 a treaty of peace, recognising Ladislaus IV of Poland, son of Polish king Sigismund III Vasa, as tsar. In 1611, False Dmitry III appeared in the Swedish-occupied territories, but was soon apprehended and executed. The Polish presence led to a patriotic revival among the Russians, and a volunteer army, financed by the Stroganov merchants and blessed by the Orthodox Church, was formed in Nizhny Novgorod and, led by Prince Dmitry Pozharsky and Kuzma Minin, drove the Poles out of the Kremlin. In 1613, a zemsky Sobor proclaimed the boyar Mikhail Romanov as tsar, beginning the 300-year reign of the Romanov family.

Andrei Ryabushkin: Tsar Michael at the Session of the Boyar Duma (1893)

After an unsuccessful attempt to regain Smolensk from Poland in 1632, Russia made peace with Poland in 1634. Polish king Władysław IV Vasa, whose father and predecessor was Sigismund III Vasa, had been elected by Russian boyars as tsar of Russia during the Time of Troubles, renounced all claims to the title as a condition of the peace treaty.

Legal code of 1649

The autocracy 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 boyar faction controlling the throne. In the 17th century, the bureaucracy expanded dramatically. The number of government departments ( prikazy; sing., ) increased from twenty-two in 1613 to eighty by mid-century. Although the departments often had overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions, the central government, through provincial governors, was able to control and regulate all social groups, as well as trade, manufacturing, and even the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Portrait of Russian diplomat and voivode Pyotr Potemkin by Godfrey Kneller

The Sobornoye Ulozheniye, a comprehensive legal code introduced in 1649, illustrates the extent of state control over Russian society. By that time, the boyars had largely merged with the new elite, who were obligatory servitors of the state, to form a new nobility, the dvoryanstvo. The state required service from both the old and the new nobility, primarily in the military because of permanent warfare on southern and western borders and attacks of nomads. In return, the nobility received land and peasants. In the preceding century, the state had gradually curtailed peasants' rights to move from one landlord to another; the 1649 code officially attached peasants to their home.

Acquisition of the Wild Fields

A warrior of the Russian noble cavalry (поместная конница) during the Russo-Polish War of 1654-1667. The drawing is based on the pieces preserved in the Kremlin Armoury.

The Tsardom of Russia continued its territorial growth through the 17th century. In the southwest, it claimed the Wild Fields (modern day Eastern Ukraine and South-Western Russia), which had been under Polish-Lithuanian rule and sought assistance from Russia to leave the rule of the Commonwealth.[citation needed ] The Zaporozhian Cossacks, warriors organized in military formations, lived in the frontier areas bordering Poland, the Crimean Tatar lands. Although part of them was serving in the Polish army as Registered Cossacks, the Zaporozhian Cossacks remained fiercely independent and staged several rebellions against the Poles. In 1648, the peasants of what is now Eastern Ukraine joined the Cossacks in rebellion during the Khmelnytsky Uprising, because of the social and religious oppression they suffered under Polish rule. Initially, Cossacks were allied with Crimean Tatars, which had helped them to throw off Polish rule. Once the Poles convinced the Tartars to switch sides, the Zaporozhian Cossacks needed military help to maintain their position.

In 1648, the Hetman (leader) of the Zaporozhian Host, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, offered to ally with the Russian tsar, Aleksey I. Aleksey's acceptance of this offer, which was ratified in the Treaty of Pereyaslav in 1654, led to a protracted war between Poland and Russia. The Truce of Andrusovo, which did not involve the Hetmanate ( Cossack Hetmanate) as a participating party of the agreement ended the war in 1667. Cossacks considered it as a Moscow betrayal. As a result, it split Cossack territory along the Dnieper River, reuniting the western sector (or Right-bank Ukraine) with Poland and leaving the eastern sector ( Left-bank Ukraine) self-governing under the sovereignty of the tsar. However, the self-government did not last long and Cossack territory was eventually incorporated into the Russian Empire (after the Battle of Poltava) during the 18th century.

Raskol (Schism)

Patriarch Nikon and Tsar Alexis in the Cathedral of the Archangel. Painting by Alexander Litovchenko.

Russia's southwestern expansion, particularly its incorporation of the Wild Fields (modern day Eastern Ukraine), had unintended consequences. Most Little Russians were Orthodox, but their close contact with the Roman Catholic Polish also brought them Western intellectual currents. Through the Cossack Academy in Kiev, Russia gained links to Polish and Central European influences and to the wider Orthodox world. Although the Zaporozhian Cossack link induced creativity in many areas, it also weakened traditional Russian religious practices and culture. The Russian Orthodox Church discovered that its isolation from Constantinople had caused variations to appear between their liturgical books and practices.

The tsar's court also felt the impact of Little Russia and the West. Kiev was a major transmitter of new ideas and insight through the famed scholarly academy that Metropolitan Mohyla founded there in 1631. Other more direct channels to the West opened as international trade increased and more foreigners came to Russia. The Tsar's court was interested in the West's more advanced technology, particularly when military applications were involved. By the end of the 17th century, Little Russian, Polish, and West European penetration had weakened the Russian cultural synthesis - at least among the elite - and had prepared the way for an even more radical transformation.

Conquest of Siberia

Vasily Surikov: Yermak's Conquest of Siberia (1895)

Russia's eastward expansion encountered little resistance. In 1581, the Stroganov merchant family, interested in the fur trade, hired a Cossack leader, Yermak Timofeyevich, to lead an expedition into western Siberia. Yermak defeated the Khanate of Sibir and claimed the territories west of the Ob and Irtysh Rivers for Russia.

From such bases as Mangazeya, merchants, traders, and explorers pushed eastward from the Ob River to the Yenisey River, then on to the Lena River and the coast of the Pacific Ocean. In 1648, Cossack Semyon Dezhnyov opened the passage between America and Asia. By the middle of the 17th century, Russians had reached the Amur River and the outskirts of the Chinese Empire.

Peter the Great and the Russian Empire

Nativity Church at Putinki, an example of the 17th-century Russian uzorochye style

These changes did not win Peter many friends, and in fact caused great political division in the country. These, along with his notorious cruelties (such as the torture murder of his own son for plotting a rebellion) and the immense human suffering that accompanied many of his projects, such as the construction of Saint Petersburg, led many pious Russians to believe that he was the Antichrist. The Great Northern War against Sweden consumed much of Peter's attention for years; however, the Swedes were eventually defeated, and peace was agreed to in 1721. Russia annexed the Baltic coast from Sweden and parts of Finland, which would become the site of the new Russian capital, Saint Petersburg. The Russian victory in the Great Northern War marked a watershed in European politics, as it not only brought about the eclipse of Sweden as a great power, but also Russia's decisive emergence as a permanent European great power. The Russian colonization of Siberia also continued, and war with Persia brought about the acquisition of territory in the Caucasus, although Russia surrendered those gains after Peter's death in 1725.

Organization

State flags

There was no single flag during the Tsardom. Instead, there were multiple flags:

Standards used by the Tsar:

Standard of the Tsar of Russia (1693-1700): white-blue-red tricolor with golden double-headed eagle in the center. Replaced by the Imperial standard in 1700 (see below).

Imperial Standard of the Tsar of Russia: black double-headed eagle carrying St. Vladimir Red Coat of Arms, on a golden rectangular field, adopted in 1700 instead of the older white-blue-red Standard of the Tsar of Moscow.

Civil flag: The early Romanov Tsars instituted the two-headed eagle Imperial Flag of the Tsar, which origin dates back to 1472, as a Civil Flag, it remained the Civil Flag of Russia until replaced during the Empire in 1858.

Civil ensign of Russia: the white-blue-red tricolor, that was adopted on 20 January 1705 by decree of Peter I.

Naval ensign of the Imperial Russian Navy: white field with a blue saltire, adopted in 1712. Before that, the naval ensign of Russia was white-blue-red tricolor.

Naval jack of the Imperial Russian Navy: red field with a blue saltire, adopted in 1700.

References

Primary sources

Grigory Kotoshikhin's Russia during the reign of Alexey Mikhailovich (1665) is the indispensable source for those studying administration of the Russian tsardom

Domostroy is a 16th-century set of rules regulating everyday behaviour in the Russian boyar families.

Secondary sources

External links

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The Tsardom of Russia, also known as the Tsardom of Muscovy, was the centralized Russian state from the assumption of the title of tsar by Ivan IV in 1547 until the foundation of the Russian Empire by Peter the Great in 1721.

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The Russian Empire was an empire that extended across Eurasia and North America from 1721, following the end of the Great Northern War, until the Republic was proclaimed by the Provisional Government that took power after the February Revolution of 1917.

The House of Romanov ruled the Russian Empire from 1721 until 1762. Its matrilineal branch of patrilineal German descent, the House of Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov, ruled from 1762 to the end of the empire. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Russian Empire extended from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea in the south, from the Baltic Sea on the west into Alaska and Northern California in America on the east. With 125.6 million subjects registered by the 1897 census, it had the third-largest population in the world at the time, after Qing China and India. Like all empires, it featured great diversity in terms of economies, ethnicities, languages, and religion. There were many dissident elements that launched numerous rebellions and assassinations over the centuries. In the 19th century, they were closely watched by the imperial secret police, and thousands were exiled to Siberia.

Economically, the empire was predominantly agricultural, with low productivity on large estates worked by Russian peasants, known as serfs, who were tied to the land in a feudal arrangement. The serfs were freed in 1861, but the landowning aristocratic class kept control. The economy slowly industrialized with the help of foreign investments in railways and factories. From the 10th through the 17th centuries, the land was ruled by a noble class, the boyars, and subsequently by an emperor.

Tsar Ivan III (1462-1505) laid the groundwork for the empire that later emerged. He tripled the territory of his state, ended the dominance of the Golden Horde, renovated the Moscow Kremlin, and laid the foundations of the Russian state. Emperor Peter the Great (1682-1725) fought numerous wars and expanded an already huge empire into a major European power. He moved the capital from Moscow to the new model city of St. Petersburg, which featured much European design. He led a cultural revolution that replaced some of the traditionalist and medieval social and political mores with a modern, scientific, Europe-oriented, and rationalist system.

Empress Catherine the Great (reigned 1762-1796) presided over a golden age; she expanded the state by conquest, colonization and diplomacy, continuing Peter the Great's policy of modernization along Western European lines. Emperor Alexander II (1855-1881) promoted numerous reforms, most dramatically the emancipation of all 23 million serfs in 1861. His policy in Eastern Europe involved protecting the Orthodox Christians under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. That connection by 1914 led to Russia's entry into the First World War on the side of France, the United Kingdom, and Serbia, against the German, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman empires.

The Russian Empire functioned as an absolute monarchy on the ideological doctrine of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality until the Revolution of 1905, when a de jure constitutional monarchy was established. The empire collapsed during the February Revolution of 1917, largely as a result of massive failures resulting from its participation in the First World War. The royal family was executed in 1918 by the Bolsheviks, who imprisoned or executed many of the aristocratic class before seizing power, which ultimately resulted in the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Though the Empire was not officially proclaimed by Tsar Peter I until after the Treaty of Nystad (1721), some historians argue that it originated either when Ivan III of Russia conquered Veliky Novgorod in 1478, or when Ivan the Terrible conquered the Khanate of Kazan in 1552.[citation needed ] According to another point of view, the term Tsardom, which was used after the coronation of Ivan IV in 1547, was already a contemporary Russian word for empire.[citation needed ]

Much of Russia's expansion occurred in the 17th century, culminating in the first Russian colonization 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 its land and population being taken under Russian rule. Most of the 19th-century growth of the empire came from adding territory in central and eastern Asia, south of Siberia.

Peter the Great (1672-1725)

Peter I the Great (1672-1725) played a major role in introducing Russia to the European state system. While the vast land had a population of 14 million, grain yields trailed behind those of agriculture in the West. Nearly the entire population was devoted to agricultural estates. Only a small percentage of the population lived in towns. The class of kholops , close in status to slavery, remained a major institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter converted household kholops into house serfs, thus including them in poll taxation. Russian agricultural kholops were formally converted into serfs earlier in 1679. They were largely tied to the land in a feudal sense until the late nineteenth century.

Peter's first military efforts were directed against the Ottoman Turks. His attention then turned to the North. Peter still lacked a secure northern seaport, except at Archangel on the White Sea, where the harbor was frozen for nine months a year. Access to the Baltic Sea was blocked by Sweden, whose territory enclosed it on three sides. Peter's ambitions for a "window to the sea" led him to make a secret alliance in 1699 with Saxony, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Denmark against Sweden; they conducted the Great Northern War. The war ended in 1721 when an exhausted Sweden asked for peace with Russia.

As a result, Peter acquired four provinces situated south and east of the Gulf of Finland, securing access to the sea. There he built Russia's new capital, Saint Petersburg, on the Neva River, to replace Moscow, which had long been Russia's cultural center. This relocation expressed his intent to adopt European elements in his empire. Many of the government and other major buildings were designed with Italianate influence. In 1722, he turned his aspirations as first Russian monarch toward increasing Russian influence in the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea at the expense of the weakened Safavid Persians. He made Astrakhan the centre of military efforts against Persia, and waged the first full-scale war against them in 1722-23.

Peter reorganized his government based on the latest political models of the time, moulding 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 divided into new provinces and districts. Peter told the Senate that its mission was to collect taxes, and tax revenues tripled over the course of his reign. Meanwhile, all vestiges of local self-government were removed. Peter continued and intensified his predecessors' requirement of state service for all nobles.

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 government official.

Peter died in 1725, leaving an unsettled succession. After a short reign of his widow Catherine I, the crown passed to empress Anna. She slowed down the reforms and led a successful war against the Ottoman Empire. This resulted in a significant weakening of the Ottoman vassal Crimean Khanate, a long-term Russian adversary.

The discontent over the dominant positions of Baltic Germans in Russian politics resulted in Peter I's daughter Elizabeth being put on the Russian throne. Elizabeth supported the arts, architecture and the sciences (for example with the foundation of the Moscow University). But she did not carry out significant structural reforms. Her reign, which lasted nearly 20 years, is also known for her involvement in the Seven Years' War. It was successful for Russia militarily, but fruitless politically.

Catherine the Great (1762-1796)

Catherine the Great was a German princess who married Peter III, the German heir to the Russian crown. After the death of Empress Elizabeth, she came to power when she conducted a coup d'état against her unpopular husband. She contributed to the resurgence of the Russian nobility that began after the death of Peter the Great. State service was abolished, and Catherine delighted the nobles further by turning over to them most state functions in the provinces. She also removed the tax on beards, instituted by Peter the Great.

Catherine the Great extended Russian political control over the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Her actions included the support of the Targowica Confederation. But the cost of her campaigns added to the burden of the oppressive social system, which required serfs to spend almost all of their time laboring on their owners' land. A major peasant uprising took place in 1773, after Catherine legalised the selling of serfs separate from land. Inspired by Cossack named Yemelyan Pugachev, and proclaiming "Hang all the landlords!", the rebels threatened to take Moscow before they were ruthlessly suppressed. Instead of imposing the traditional punishment of drawing and quartering, Catherine issued secret instructions that the executioners should carry the death sentences quickly and with a minimum of suffering, as part of her effort to introduce compassion into the law. She also ordered the public trial of Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova, a high nobleman, on charges of torture and murder of serfs. These gestures of compassion garnered Catherine much positive attention from Europe in the Enlightenment age. But the specter of revolution and disorder continued to haunt her and her successors.

In order to ensure continued support from the nobility, which was essential to the survival of her government, Catherine was obliged to strengthen their authority and power at the expense of the serfs and other lower classes. Nevertheless, Catherine realized that serfdom must be ended, going so far in her ("Instruction") to say that serfs were "just as good as we are" - a comment the nobility received with disgust. Catherine successfully waged war against the Ottoman Empire and advanced Russia's southern boundary to the Black Sea. Then, by plotting with the rulers of Austria and Prussia, she incorporated territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Partitions of Poland, pushing the Russian frontier westward into Central Europe. Russia had signed the Treaty of Georgievsk with the Georgian Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti to protect them against any new invasion of their Persian suzerains. As part of this and her own political aspirations, Catherine waged a new war against Persia in 1796 after they had invaded eastern Georgia; victorious, she established Russian rule over it and expelled the newly established Russian garrisons in the Caucasus. By the time of her death in 1796, Catherine's expansionist policy had developed Russia as a major European power. This continued with Alexander I's wresting of Finland from the weakened kingdom of Sweden in 1809 and of Bessarabia from the Principality of Moldavia, ceded by the Ottomans in 1812.

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 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 bankers in Amsterdam; five percent of the budget was allocated to debt payments. Paper money was issued to pay for expensive wars, thus causing inflation. As a result of its spending, Russia developed a large and well-equipped army, a very large and complex bureaucracy, and a court that rivaled those of Paris and London. But the government was living far beyond its means, and 18th-century Russia remained "a poor, backward, overwhelmingly agricultural, and illiterate country".

In 1812 French Emperor Napoleon, following a dispute with Tsar Alexander I, launched an invasion of Russia. It was catastrophic for France, as his army was decimated through the winter. Although Napoleon's Grande Armée reached Moscow, the Russians' scorched earth strategy prevented the invaders from living off the country. In the harsh and bitter Russian winter, thousands of French troops were ambushed and killed by peasant guerrilla fighters. As Napoleon's forces retreated, the Russian troops pursued them into Central and Western Europe and to the gates of Paris. After Russia and its allies defeated Napoleon, Alexander became known as the 'saviour of Europe'. He presided over the redrawing of the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1815), which ultimately made Alexander the monarch of Congress Poland.

Although the Russian Empire played a leading political role in the next century, thanks to its defeat of Napoleonic France, its retention of serfdom precluded economic progress of any significant degree. As Western European economic growth accelerated during the Industrial Revolution, Russia began to lag ever farther behind, creating new weaknesses for the Empire seeking to play a role as a great power. This status concealed the inefficiency of its government, the isolation of its people, and its economic and social backwardness. Following the defeat of Napoleon, Alexander I had been ready to discuss constitutional reforms, but though a few were introduced, no major changes were attempted.

The liberal tsar was replaced by his younger brother, Nicholas I (1825-1855), who at the beginning 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 travelled in Europe in the course of 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 the modernization program begun by Peter the Great and champion the doctrine of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.

The retaliation for the revolt made "December Fourteenth" a day long remembered by later revolutionary movements. In order to repress further revolts, censorship was intensified, including the constant surveillance of schools and universities. Textbooks were strictly regulated by the government. Police spies were planted everywhere. Would-be revolutionaries were sent off to Siberia - under Nicholas I hundreds of thousands were sent to katorga there.

The question of Russia's direction had been gaining attention ever since Peter the Great's program of modernization. Some favored imitating Western Europe while others were against this and called for a return to the traditions of the past. The latter path was advocated by Slavophiles, who held the "decadent" West in contempt. The Slavophiles were opponents of bureaucracy who preferred the collectivism of the medieval Russian or mir over the individualism of the West. More extreme social doctrines were elaborated by such Russian radicals on the left as Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin.

After the Russian armies liberated allied (since the 1783 Treaty of Georgievsk) Eastern Georgian Kingdom from the Qajar dynasty's occupation in 1802,[citation needed ] in the Russo-Persian War (1804-13) they clashed with Persia over control and consolidation over Georgia, and also got involved in the Caucasian War against the Caucasian Imamate. The conclusion of the 1804-1813 war with Persia made it irrevocably cede what is now Dagestan, eastern Georgia, and most of Azerbaijan to Russia following the Treaty of Gulistan. To the south-west, Russia attempted to expand at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, using recently acquired Georgia at its base for the Caucasus and Anatolian front. The late 1820s were successful military years. Despite losing almost all recently consolidated territories in the first year of the Russo-Persian War of 1826-28, Russia managed to bring an end to the war with highly favourable terms with the Treaty of Turkmenchay, including the official gains of what is now Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iğdır Province. In the 1828-29 Russo-Turkish War, Russia invaded northeastern Anatolia and occupied the strategic Ottoman towns of Erzurum and Gümüşhane 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.

Russian tsars crushed two uprisings in their newly acquired Polish territories: the November Uprising in 1830 and the January Uprising in 1863. The Russian autocracy gave the Polish artisans and gentry reason to rebel in 1863 by assailing national core values of language, religion, culture. The result was the January Uprising, a massive Polish revolt, which was crushed by massive force. 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.

In 1854-55 Russia lost to Britain, France and Turkey in the Crimean War, which was fought primarily in the Crimean peninsula, and to a lesser extent in the Baltic. Since playing a major role in the defeat of Napoleon, Russia had been regarded as militarily invincible, but against a coalition of the great powers of Europe, the reverses it suffered on land and sea exposed the decay and weakness of Tsar Nicholas' regime.

When Tsar Alexander II ascended the throne in 1855, desire for reform was widespread. A growing humanitarian movement attacked serfdom as inefficient. In 1859, there were more than 23 million serfs in usually poor living conditions. Alexander II decided to abolish serfdom from above, with ample provision for the landowners, rather than wait for it to be abolished from below in a revolutionary way that would hurt the landowners.

The emancipation reform of 1861 that freed the serfs was the single most important event in 19th-century Russian history, and the beginning of the end for the landed aristocracy's monopoly of power. Further reforms of 1860s included socio-economic reforms to clarify the position of the Russian government in the field of property rights and their protection. Emancipation brought a supply of free labour to the cities, stimulating industry, and the middle class grew in number and influence. However, instead of receiving their lands as a gift, the freed peasants had to pay a special tax for what amounted to their lifetime to the government, which in turn paid the landlords a generous price for the land that they had lost. In numerous cases the peasants ended up with the smallest amount of land. All the property 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. Although serfdom was abolished, since its abolition was achieved on terms unfavourable to the peasants, revolutionary tensions were not abated, despite Alexander II's intentions. Revolutionaries believed that the newly freed serfs were merely being sold into wage slavery in the onset of the industrial revolution, and that the bourgeoisie had effectively replaced landowners.

Alexander II obtained Outer Manchuria from the Qing China between 1858-1860 and sold the last territories of Russian America, Alaska, to the United States in 1867.

In the late 1870s Russia and the Ottoman Empire again clashed in the Balkans. From 1875 to 1877, the Balkan crisis intensified with rebellions against Ottoman rule by various Slavic nationalities, which the Ottoman Turks dominated since the 16th century. This was seen as a political risk in Russia, which similarly suppressed its Muslims in Central Asia and Caucasia. Russian nationalist opinion became a major domestic factor in its support for liberating Balkan Christians from Ottoman rule and making Bulgaria and Serbia independent. In early 1877, Russia intervened on behalf of Serbian and Russian volunteer forces in the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78). Within one year, Russian troops were nearing Istanbul and the Ottomans surrendered. Russia's nationalist diplomats and generals persuaded Alexander II to force the Ottomans to sign the Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878, creating an enlarged, independent Bulgaria that stretched into the southwestern Balkans. When Britain threatened to declare war over the terms of the Treaty of San Stefano, an exhausted Russia backed down. At the Congress of Berlin in July 1878, Russia agreed to the creation of a smaller Bulgaria, as an autonomous principality inside the Ottoman Empire. As a result, Pan-Slavists were left with a legacy of bitterness against Austria-Hungary and Germany for failing to back Russia. Disappointment at the results of the war stimulated revolutionary tensions, and helped Serbia, Romania and Montenegro to gain independence from and strengthen themselves against the Ottomans.

Another significant result of the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War in Russia's favour was the acquisition from the Ottomans of the provinces of Batum, Ardahan and Kars in Transcaucasia, which were transformed into the militarily administered regions of Batum Oblast and Kars Oblast. To replace Muslim refugees who had fled across the new frontier into Ottoman territory the Russian authorities settled large numbers of Christians from an ethnically diverse range of communities in Kars Oblast, particularly the Georgians, Caucasus Greeks and Armenians, each of whom hoped to achieve protection and advance their own regional ambitions on the back of the Russian Empire.

In 1881 Alexander II was assassinated by the Narodnaya Volya, a Nihilist terrorist organization. The throne passed to Alexander III (1881-1894), a reactionary who revived the maxim of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality" of Nicholas I. A committed Slavophile, Alexander III believed that Russia could be saved from turmoil only by shutting itself off from the subversive influences of Western Europe. During his reign Russia declared the Franco-Russian Alliance to contain the growing power of Germany, completed the conquest of Central Asia and demanded important territorial and commercial concessions from the Qing. 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, as well as disliking democracy, constitutions, and the parliamentary system. Under Pobedonostsev, revolutionaries were persecuted and a policy of Russification was carried out throughout the Empire.

Russia had much less difficulty in expanding to the south, including the conquest of Turkestan. However, Britain became alarmed when Russia threatened Afghanistan, with the implicit threat to India, and decades of diplomatic maneuvering resulted, called The Great Game. It finally ended with an Anglo-Russian Entente in 1907. Expansion into the vast stretches of Siberia was slow and expensive, but finally became possible with the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway, 1890 to 1904. This opened up East Asia, and Russian interests focused on Mongolia, Manchuria, and Korea. China was too weak to resist, and was pulled increasingly into the Russian sphere. Japan strongly opposed Russian expansion, and defeated Russia in a war in 1904-1905. Japan took over Korea, and Manchuria remained a contested area. Meanwhile, France, looking for allies against Germany after 1871, formed a military alliance in 1894, with large-scale loans to Russia, sales of arms, and warships, as well as diplomatic support. Once Afghanistan was informally partitioned in 1907, Britain, France and Russia came increasingly close together in opposition to Germany and Austria. They formed a loose Triple Entente that played a central role in the First World War. That war broke out when the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with strong German support, tried to suppress Serbian nationalism, and Russia supported Serbia. Everyone began to mobilize, and Berlin decided to act before the others were ready to fight, first invading Belgium and France in the west, and then Russia in the east.

In 1894, Alexander III was succeeded by his son, Nicholas II, who was committed to retaining the autocracy that his father had left him. Nicholas II proved ineffective as a ruler and in the end his dynasty was overthrown by revolution. The Industrial Revolution began to show significant influence in Russia, but the country remained rural and poor. The liberal elements among industrial capitalists and nobility believed in peaceful social reform and a constitutional monarchy, forming the Constitutional Democratic Party or Kadets. Economic conditions steadily improved after 1890 thanks to new crops such as sugar beets, and new access to railway transportation. Total grain production increased, after allowing for population growth in exports. As a result, there was a slow improvement in the living standards of Russian peasants in the Empire's last two decades before 1914. Recent research into the physical stature of Army recruits shows they were bigger and stronger. There were regional variations, with more poverty in the heavily populated central black earth region, and there were temporary downturns in 1891-93 and 1905-1908.

On the right, the reactionary elements of the aristocracy strongly favored The large landholders, who however were slowly Selling their land to the peasants through the Peasant Bank. The October's party was a conservative force, with a base in many landowners and also businessmen. They accepted land reform but insisted that property owners be fully paid. The Cadets So the bourgeois democracy in Russia. They favored far-reaching reforms, and hoped the landlord class would fade away, while agreeing they should be paid for their land. On the left the Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats wanted to expropriate the landowners, without payment, but debated whether to divide the land up among the peasants, or to put it into collective local ownership. On the left, the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs) incorporated the Narodnik tradition and advocated the distribution of land among those who actually worked it - the peasants. Another radical group was the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, exponents of Marxism in Russia. The Social Democrats differed from the SRs in that they believed a revolution must rely on urban workers, not the peasantry.

In 1903, at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London, the party split into two wings: the gradualist Mensheviks and the more radical Bolsheviks. The Mensheviks believed that the Russian working class was insufficiently developed and that socialism could be achieved only after a period of bourgeois democratic rule. They thus tended to ally themselves with the forces of bourgeois liberalism. The Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin, supported the idea of forming 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.

Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) was a major blow to the Tsarist regime and further increased the potential for unrest. In January 1905, an incident known as " Bloody Sunday" occurred when Father Georgy 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, soldiers opened fire on the crowd, killing hundreds. The Russian masses were so furious over the massacre that a general strike was declared demanding a democratic republic. This marked the beginning of the Revolution of 1905. Soviets (councils of workers) appeared in most cities to direct revolutionary activity. Russia was paralyzed, and the government was desperate.

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 become final without confirmation by the Duma. The moderate groups were satisfied. But the socialists rejected the concessions as insufficient and tried to organise new strikes. By the end of 1905, there was disunity among the reformers, and the tsar's position was strengthened for the time being.

Tsar Nicholas II and his subjects entered World War I with enthusiasm and patriotism, with the defense of Russia's fellow Orthodox Slavs, the Serbs, as the main battle cry. In August 1914, the Russian army invaded Germany's province of East Prussia and occupied a significant portion of Austrian-controlled Galicia in support of the Serbs and their allies - the French and British. In September 1914, in order to relieve pressure on France, the Russians were forced to halt a successful offensive against Austro-Hungary in Galicia in order to attack German-held Silesia. Military reversals and shortages among the civilian population soon soured much of the population. German control of the Baltic Sea and German-Ottoman control of the Black Sea severed Russia from most of its foreign supplies and potential markets.

By the middle of 1915, the impact of the war was demoralizing. Food and fuel were in short supply, casualties were increasing, and inflation was mounting. Strikes rose among low-paid factory workers, and there were reports that peasants, who wanted reforms of land ownership, were restless. The tsar eventually decided to take personal command of the army and moved to the front, leaving his wife, the Empress Alexandra in charge in the capital. The illness of her son Alexei led her to trust the semi-literate Siberian peasant Grigori Rasputin (1869-1916), who convinced the royal family that he possessed healing powers that would cure Alexei. He had gained enormous influence but did not shift any major decisions. His assassination in late 1916 by a clique of nobles restored their honor but could not restore the Tsar's lost prestige.

The Tsarist system was overthrown in the February Revolution in 1917. The Bolsheviks declared "no annexations, no indemnities" and called on workers to accept their policies and demanded the end of the war. On 3 March 1917, a strike was organized on a factory in the capital, Petrograd; within a week nearly all the workers in the city were idle, and street fighting broke out. Rabinowitch argues that "[t]he 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." Swain says, "The first government to be formed after the February Revolution of 1917 had, with one exception, been composed of liberals."

With his authority destroyed, Nicholas abdicated on 2 March 1917. The execution of the Romanov family at the hands of Bolsheviks followed in 1918.

The administrative boundaries of European Russia, apart from Finland and its portion of Poland, coincided approximately with the natural limits of the East-European plains. In the North it met the Arctic Ocean. Novaya Zemlya and the Kolguyev and Vaygach Islands also belonged to it, but the Kara Sea was referred to Siberia. To the East it had the Asiatic territories of the Empire, Siberia and the Kyrgyz steppes, from both of which it was separated by the Ural Mountains, the Ural River and the Caspian Sea - the administrative boundary, however, partly extending into Asia on the Siberian slope of the Urals. To the South it had the Black Sea and Caucasus, being separated from the latter by the Manych River depression, which in Post- Pliocene times connected the Sea of Azov with the Caspian. The western boundary was purely conventional: it crossed the Kola Peninsula from the Varangerfjord to the Gulf of Bothnia. Thence it ran to the Curonian Lagoon in the southern Baltic Sea, and thence to the mouth of the Danube, taking a great circular sweep to the west to embrace Poland, and separating Russia from Prussia, Austrian Galicia and Romania.

By the end of the 19th century the size of the empire was about 22,400,000 square kilometers (8,600,000 sq mi) or almost 1/6 of the Earth's landmass; its only rival in size at the time was the British Empire. However, at this time, the majority of the population lived in European Russia. More than 100 different ethnic groups lived in the Russian Empire, with ethnic Russians composing about 45% of the population.

In addition to almost the entire territory of modern Russia, prior to 1917 the Russian Empire included most of Dnieper Ukraine, Belarus, Bessarabia, the Grand Duchy of Finland, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Central Asian states of Russian Turkestan, most of the Baltic governorates, as well as a significant portion of the Kingdom of Poland and Ardahan, Artvin, Iğdır, Kars and northeastern part of Erzurum Provinces from the Ottoman Empire.

Between 1742 and 1867, the Russian-American Company administered Alaska as a colony. The Company also established settlements in Hawaii, including Fort Elizabeth (1817), and as far south in North America as Fort Ross Colony (established in 1812) in Sonoma County, California just north of San Francisco. Both Fort Ross and the Russian River in California got their names from Russian settlers, who had staked claims in a region claimed until 1821 by the Spanish as part of New Spain.

Saint Petersburg gradually extended and consolidated its control over the Caucasus in the course of the 19th century at the expense of Persia through the Russo-Persian Wars of 1804-13 and 1826-28 and the respectively ensuing treaties of Gulistan and Turkmenchay, as well as through the Caucasian War (1817-1864).

The Russian Empire expanded its influence and possessions in Central Asia, especially in the later 19th century, conquering much of Russian Turkestan in 1865 and continuing to add territory as late as 1885.

Newly discovered Arctic islands became part of the Russian Empire as Russian explorers found them: the New Siberian Islands from the early 18th century; Severnaya Zemlya ("Emperor Nicholas II Land") first mapped and claimed as late as 1913.

During World War I, Russia briefly occupied a small part of East Prussia, then part of Germany; a significant portion of Austrian Galicia; and significant portions of Ottoman Armenia. While the modern Russian Federation currently controls the Kaliningrad Oblast, which comprised the northern part of East Prussia, this differs from the area captured by the Empire in 1914, though there was some overlap: Gusev ( Gumbinnen in German) was the site of the initial Russian victory.

According to the 1st article of the Organic Law, the Russian Empire was one indivisible state. In addition, the 26th article stated that "With the Imperial Russian throne are indivisible the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Principality of Finland". Relations with the Grand Principality of Finland were also regulated by the 2nd article, "The Grand Principality of Finland, constituted an indivisible part of the Russian state, in its internal affairs governed by special regulations at the base of special laws" and the law of 10 June 1910.

Between 1744 and 1867, the empire also controlled Russian America. With the exception of this territory - modern-day Alaska - the Russian Empire was a contiguous mass of land spanning Europe and Asia. In this it differed from contemporary colonial-style empires. The result of this was that while the British and French colonial empires declined in the 20th century, the Russian Empire kept a large portion of its territory, first as the Soviet Union, and later as part of present-day Russia as well as the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Furthermore, the empire at times controlled concession territories, notably the Kwantung Leased Territory and the Chinese Eastern Railway, both conceded by Qing China, as well as a concession in Tianjin. See for these periods of extraterritorial control the empire of Japan-Russian Empire relations.

In 1815, Dr. Schäffer, a Russian entrepreneur, went to Kauai and negotiated a treaty of protection with the island's governor Kaumualii, vassal of King Kamehameha I of Hawaii, but the Russian Tsar refused to ratify the treaty. See also Orthodox Church in Hawaii and Russian Fort Elizabeth.

In 1889, a Russian adventurer, Nikolay Ivanovitch Achinov, tried to establish a Russian colony in Africa, Sagallo, situated on the Gulf of Tadjoura in present-day Djibouti. However this attempt angered the French, who dispatched two gunboats against the colony. After a brief resistance, the colony surrendered and the Russian settlers were deported to Odessa.

From its initial creation until the 1905 Revolution, the Russian Empire was controlled by its tsar/emperor as an absolute monarch, under the system of tsarist autocracy. After the Revolution of 1905, Russia developed a new type of government which became difficult to categorize. In the Almanach de Gotha for 1910, Russia was described as "a constitutional monarchy under an autocratic tsar". This contradiction in terms demonstrated the difficulty of precisely defining the system, essentially transitional and meanwhile sui generis, established in the Russian Empire after October 1905. Before this date, the fundamental laws of Russia described the power of the Emperor as "autocratic and unlimited". After October 1905, while the imperial style was still "Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias", the fundamental laws were remodeled by removing the word unlimited. While the emperor retained many of his old prerogatives, including an absolute veto over all legislation, he equally agreed to the establishment of an elected parliament, without whose consent no laws were to be enacted in Russia. Not that the regime in Russia had become in any true sense constitutional, far less parliamentary. But the "unlimited autocracy" had given place to a "self-limited autocracy". Whether this autocracy was to be permanently limited by the new changes, or only at the continuing discretion of the autocrat, became a subject of heated controversy between conflicting parties in the state. Provisionally, then, the Russian governmental system may perhaps be best defined as "a limited monarchy under an autocratic emperor".

Conservatism was the reigning ideology for most of the Russian leadership, albeit with some reformist activities from time to time. The structure of conservative thought was based upon antirationalism of the intellectuals, religiosity rooted in the Russian Orthodox Church, traditionalism rooted in the landed estates worked by serfs, and militarism rooted in the Army officer corps. Regarding irrationality, Russia avoided the full force of the European Enlightenment, which gave priority to rationalism, preferring the romanticism of an idealized nation state that reflected the beliefs, values and behavior of the distinctive people. The distinctly liberal notion of "progress" was replaced by a conservative notion of modernization based on the incorporation of modern technology to serve the established system. The promise of modernization in the service of autocracy frightened the socialist intellectual Alexander Herzen who warned of a Russia governed by "Genghis Khan with a telegraph."

Peter the Great changed his title from Tsar in 1721, when he was declared Emperor of all Russia. While later rulers did not discard this new title, the ruler of Russia was commonly known as Tsar or Tsaritsa until the imperial system was abolished during the February Revolution of 1917. Prior to the issuance of the October Manifesto, the tsar ruled as an absolute monarch, subject to only two limitations on his authority (both of which were intended to protect the existing system): the Emperor and his consort must both belong to the Russian Orthodox Church, and he must obey the laws of succession ( Pauline Laws) established by Paul I. Beyond this, the power of the Russian Autocrat was virtually limitless.

On 17 October 1905, the situation changed: the ruler voluntarily limited his legislative power by decreeing that no measure was to become law without the consent of the Imperial Duma, a freely elected national assembly established by the Organic Law issued on 28 April 1906. However, he retained the right to disband the newly established Duma, and he exercised this right more than once. He also retained an absolute veto over all legislation, and only he could initiate any changes to the Organic Law itself. His ministers were responsible solely to him, and not to the Duma or any other authority, which could question but not remove them. Thus, while the tsar's personal powers were limited in scope after 28 April 1906, it still remained formidable.

Under Russia's revised Fundamental Law of 20 February 1906, the Council of the Empire was associated with the Duma as a legislative Upper House; from this time the legislative power was exercised normally by the Emperor only in concert with the two chambers. The Council of the Empire, or Imperial Council, as reconstituted for this purpose, consisted of 196 members, of whom 98 were nominated by the Emperor, while 98 were elective. The ministers, also nominated, were members. Of the elected members, 3 were returned by the "black" clergy (the monks), 3 by the "white" clergy (seculars), 18 by the corporations of nobles, 6 by the academy of sciences and the universities, 6 by the chambers of commerce, 6 by the industrial councils, 34 by the governments having zemstvos, 16 by those having no zemstvos, and 6 by Poland. As a legislative body the powers of the Council were coordinate with those of the Duma; in practice, however, it has seldom if ever initiated legislation.

The Duma of the Empire or Imperial Duma (Gosudarstvennaya Duma), which formed the Lower House of the Russian parliament, consisted (since the of 2 June 1907) of 442 members, elected by an exceedingly complicated process. The membership was manipulated as to secure an overwhelming majority of the wealthy (especially the landed classes) and also for the representatives of the Russian peoples at the expense of the subject nations. Each province of the Empire, except Central Asia, returned a certain number of members; added to these were those returned by several large cities. The members of the Duma were chosen by electoral colleges and these, in their turn, were elected in assemblies of the three classes: landed proprietors, citizens and peasants. In these assemblies the wealthiest proprietors sat in person while the lesser proprietors were represented by delegates. The urban population was divided into two categories according to taxable wealth, and elected delegates directly to the college of the Governorates. The peasants were represented by delegates selected by the regional subdivisions called volosts. Workmen were treated in special manner with every industrial concern employing fifty hands or over electing one or more delegates to the electoral college.

In the college itself, the voting for the Duma was by secret ballot and a simple majority carried the day. Since the majority consisted of conservative elements (the landowners and urban delegates), the progressives had little chance of representation at all save for the curious provision that one member at least in each government was to be chosen from each of the five classes represented in the college. That the Duma had any radical elements was mainly due to the peculiar franchise enjoyed by the seven largest towns - Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Riga and the Polish cities of Warsaw and Łódź. These elected their delegates to the Duma directly, and though their votes were divided (on the basis of taxable property) in such a way as to give the advantage to wealth, each returned the same number of delegates.

In 1905, a Council of Ministers (Sovyet Ministrov) was created, under a minister president, the first appearance of a prime minister in Russia. This council consists of all the ministers and of the heads of the principal administrations. The ministries were as follows:

The Most Holy Synod (established in 1721) was the supreme organ of government of the Orthodox Church in Russia. It was presided over by a lay procurator, representing the Emperor, and consisted of the three metropolitans of Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Kiev, the archbishop of Georgia, and a number of bishops sitting in rotation.

The Senate (Pravitelstvuyushchi Senat, i.e. directing or governing senate), originally established during the government reform of Peter I, consisted of members nominated by the Emperor. Its wide variety of functions were carried out by the different departments into which it was divided. It was the supreme court of cassation; an audit office, a high court of justice for all political offences; one of its departments fulfilled the functions of a heralds' college. It also had supreme jurisdiction in all disputes arising out of the administration of the Empire, notably differences between representatives of the central power and the elected organs of local self-government. Lastly, it promulgated new laws, a function which theoretically gave it a power akin to that of the Supreme Court of the United States, of rejecting measures not in accordance with fundamental laws.

For administration, Russia was divided (as of 1914) into 81 governorates (guberniyas), 20 oblasts, and 1 okrug. Vassals and protectorates of the Russian Empire included the Emirate of Bukhara, the Khanate of Khiva and, after 1914, Tuva (Uriankhai). Of these 11 Governorates, 17 oblasts and 1 okrug ( Sakhalin) belonged to Asian Russia. Of the rest 8 Governorates were in Finland, 10 in Poland. European Russia thus embraced 59 governorates and 1 oblast (that of the Don). The Don Oblast was under the direct jurisdiction of the ministry of war; the rest had each a governor and deputy-governor, the latter presiding over the administrative council. In addition there were governors-general, generally placed over several governorates and armed with more extensive powers usually including the command of the troops within the limits of their jurisdiction. In 1906, there were governors-general in Finland, Warsaw, Vilna, Kiev, Moscow, and Riga. The larger cities (Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Sevastopol, Kerch, Nikolayev, Rostov) had an administrative system of their own, independent of the governorates; in these the chief of police acted as governor.

The judicial system of the Russian Empire, existed from the mid-19th century, was established by the "tsar emancipator" Alexander II, by the statute of 20 November 1864 (Sudebny Ustav). This system - based partly on English, partly on French models - was built up on certain broad principles: the separation of judicial and administrative functions; the independence of the judges and courts; the publicity of trials and oral procedure; and the equality of all classes before the law. Moreover, a democratic element was introduced by the adoption of the jury system and - so far as one order of tribunal was concerned - the election of judges. The establishment of a judicial system on these principles constituted a major change in the conception of the Russian state, which, by placing the administration of justice outside the sphere of the executive power, ceased to be a despotism. This fact made the system especially obnoxious to the bureaucracy, and during the latter years of Alexander II and the reign of Alexander III there was a piecemeal taking back of what had been given. It was reserved for the third Duma, after the 1905 Revolution, to begin the reversal of this process.

The system established by the law of 1864 was significant in that it set up two wholly separate orders of tribunals, each having their own courts of appeal and coming in contact only in the Senate, as the supreme court of cassation. The first of these, based on the English model, are the courts of the elected justices of the peace, with jurisdiction over petty causes, whether civil or criminal; the second, based on the French model, are the ordinary tribunals of nominated judges, sitting with or without a jury to hear important cases.

Alongside the local organs of the central government in Russia there are three classes of local elected bodies charged with administrative functions:

Since 1870 the municipalities in European Russia have had institutions like those of the zemstvos. All owners of houses, and tax-paying merchants, artisans and workmen are enrolled on lists in a descending order according to their assessed wealth. The total valuation is then divided into three equal parts, representing three groups of electors very unequal in number, each of which elects an equal number of delegates to the municipal duma. The executive is in the hands of an elective mayor and an uprava, which consists of several members elected by the duma. Under Alexander III, however, by laws promulgated in 1892 and 1894, the municipal dumas were subordinated to the governors in the same way as the zemstvos. In 1894 municipal institutions, with still more restricted powers, were granted to several towns in Siberia, and in 1895 to some in Caucasia.

The formerly Swedish-controlled Baltic provinces ( Courland, Livonia and Estonia) were incorporated into the Russian Empire after the defeat of Sweden in the Great Northern War. Under the Treaty of Nystad of 1721, the Baltic German nobility retained considerable powers of self-government and numerous privileges in matters affecting education, police and the administration of local justice. After 167 years of German language administration and education, laws were declared in 1888 and 1889 where the rights of the police and manorial justice were transferred from Baltic German control to officials of the central government. Since about the same time a process of Russification was being carried out in the same provinces, in all departments of administration, in the higher schools and in the Imperial University of Dorpat, the name of which was altered to Yuriev. In 1893 district committees for the management of the peasants' affairs, similar to those in the purely Russian governments, were introduced into this part of the empire.

The planning and building of the railway network after 1860 had far-reaching effects on the economy, culture, and ordinary life of Russia. The central authorities and the imperial elite made most of the key decisions, but local elites set up a demand for rail linkages. Local nobles, merchants, and entrepreneurs imagined the future from "locality" to "empire" to promote their regional interests. Often they had to compete with other cities. By envisioning their own role in a rail network they came to understand how important they were to the empire's economy.

The Russian army built two major railway lines in Central Asia during the 1880s. The Transcaucasus Railway connected the city of Batum on the Black Sea and the oil center of Baku on the Caspian Sea. The Trans-Caspian Railway began at Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea and reached Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent. Both lines served the commercial and strategic needs of the empire, and facilitated migration.

The Russian Empire's state religion was Orthodox Christianity. The Emperor was not allowed to ″profess any faith other than the Orthodox″ (Article 62 of the 1906 Fundamental Laws) and was deemed ″the Supreme Defender and Guardian of the dogmas of the predominant Faith and is the Keeper of the purity of the Faith and all good order within the Holy Church″ (Article 64 ex supra). Although he made and annulled all senior ecclesiastical appointments, he did not determine the questions of dogma or church teaching. The principal ecclesiastical authority of the Russian Church that extended its jurisdiction over the entire territory of the Empire, including the ex- Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti, was the Most Holy Synod, the civilian Over Procurator of the Holy Synod being one of the council of ministers with wide de facto powers in ecclesiastical matters. All religions were freely professed, except that certain restrictions were laid upon the Jews and some marginal sects. According to returns published in 1905, based on the Russian Imperial Census of 1897, adherents of the different religious communities in the whole of the Russian empire numbered approximately as follows.

The ecclesiastical heads of the national Russian Orthodox Church consisted of three metropolitans (Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev), fourteen archbishops and fifty bishops, all drawn from the ranks of the monastic (celibate) clergy. The parochial clergy had to be married when appointed, but if left widowers were not allowed to marry again; this rule continues to apply today.

The military of the Russian Empire consisted of the Imperial Russian Army and the Imperial Russian Navy. The poor performance during the Crimean War, 1853-56, caused great soul-searching and proposals for reform. However the Russian forces fell further behind the technology, training and organization of the German, French and particularly the British military.

The army performed poorly in World War I and became a center of unrest and revolutionary activity. The events of the February Revolution and the fierce political struggles inside army units facilitated disintegration and made it irreversible.

An officer of the Imperial Russian Army

A dragoon of the Imperial Russian Army

The Russian Empire was, predominantly, a rural society spread over vast spaces. In 1913, 80% of the people were peasants. Soviet historiography proclaimed that the Russian Empire of the 19th century was characterized by systemic crisis, which impoverished the workers and peasants and culminated in the revolutions of the early 20th century. Recent research by Russian scholars disputes this interpretation. Mironov assesses the effects of the reforms of latter 19th-century especially in terms of the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, agricultural output trends, various standard of living indicators, and taxation of peasants. He argues that they brought about measurable improvements in social welfare. More generally, he finds that the well-being of the Russian people declined during most of the 18th century, but increased slowly from the end of the 18th century to 1914.

Subjects of the Russian Empire were segregated into sosloviyes, or social estates (classes) such as nobility (dvoryanstvo), clergy, merchants, cossacks and peasants. Native people of the Caucasus, non-ethnic Russian areas such as Tartarstan, Bashkirstan, Siberia and Central Asia were officially registered as a category called (non-Slavic, literally: "people of another origin").

A majority of the people, 81.6%, belonged to the peasant order, the others were: nobility, 0.6%; clergy, 0.1%; the burghers and merchants, 9.3%; and military, 6.1%. More than 88 million of the Russians were peasants. A part of them were formerly serfs (10,447,149 males in 1858) - the remainder being " state peasants " (9,194,891 males in 1858, exclusive of the Archangel Governorate) and " domain peasants " (842,740 males the same year).

The serfdom that had developed in Russia in the 16th century, and had become enshrined by law in 1649, was abolished in 1861.

The household servants or dependents attached to the personal service were merely set free, while the landed peasants received their houses and orchards, and allotments of arable land. These allotments were given over to the rural commune, the , which was made responsible for the payment of taxes for the allotments. For these allotments the peasants had to pay a fixed rent, which could be fulfilled by personal labour. The allotments could be redeemed by peasants with the help of the Crown, and then they were freed from all obligations to the landlord. The Crown paid the landlord and the peasants had to repay the Crown, for forty-nine years at 6% interest. The financial redemption to the landlord was not calculated on the value of the allotments, but was considered as a compensation for the loss of the compulsory labour of the serfs. Many proprietors contrived to curtail the allotments which the peasants had occupied under serfdom, and frequently deprived them of precisely the parts of which they were most in need: pasture lands around their houses. The result was to compel the peasants to rent land from their former masters.

The former serfs became peasants, joining the millions of farmers who were already in the peasant status. Were peasants living in tens of thousands of small villages and a highly patriarchal system. Hundreds of thousands of move to cities to work in factories, but they typically retained their village connections.

After the Emancipation reform, one quarter of peasants received allotments of only 2.9 acres (12,000 m ²) per male, and one-half less than 8.5 to 11.4 acres; the normal size of the allotment necessary for the subsistence of a family under the three-fields system is estimated at 28 to 42 acres (170,000 m ²). Land must thus of necessity be rented from the landlords. The aggregate value of the redemption and land taxes often reached 185 to 275% of the normal rental value of the allotments, not to speak of taxes for recruiting purposes, the church, roads, local administration and so on, chiefly levied from the peasants. The areas increased every year; one-fifth of the inhabitants left their houses; cattle disappeared. Every year more than half the adult males (in some districts three-quarters of the men and one-third of the women) quit their homes and wandered throughout Russia in search of labor. In the governments of the Black Earth Area the state of matters was hardly better. Many peasants took "gratuitous allotments," whose amount was about one-eighth of the normal allotments.

The average allotment in Kherson was only 0.90-acre (3,600 m ²), and for allotments from 2.9 to 5.8 acres (23,000 m ²) the peasants pay 5 to 10 rubles of redemption tax. The state peasants were better off, but still they were emigrating in masses. It was only in the steppe governments that the situation was more hopeful. In Ukraine, where the allotments were personal (the mir existing only among state peasants), the state of affairs does not differ for the better, on account of the high redemption taxes. In the western provinces, where the land was valued cheaper and the allotments somewhat increased after the Polish insurrection, the general situation was better. Finally, in the Baltic provinces nearly all the land belonged to the German landlords, who either farmed the land themselves, with hired laborers, or let it in small farms. Only one quarter of the peasants were farmers; the remainder were mere laborers.

The situation of the former serf-proprietors was also unsatisfactory. Accustomed to the use of compulsory labor, they failed to adapt to the new conditions. The millions of rubles of redemption money received from the crown was spent without any real or lasting agricultural improvements having been effected. The forests were sold, and the only prosperous landlords were those who exacted rack-rents for the land without which the peasants could not live upon their allotments. During the years 1861 to 1892 the land owned by the nobles decreased 30%, or from 210,000,000 to 150,000,000 acres (610,000 km ²); during the following four years an additional 2,119,500 acres (8,577 km ²) were sold; and since then the sales went on at an accelerated rate, until in 1903 alone close to 2,000,000 acres (8,000 km ²) passed out of their hands. On the other hand, since 1861, and more especially since 1882, when the Peasant Land Bank was founded for making advances to peasants who were desirous of purchasing land, the former serfs, or rather their descendants, had between 1883 and 1904 bought about 19,500,000 acres (78,900 km ²) from their former masters. There was an increase of wealth among the few, but along with this a general impoverishment of the mass of the people, and the peculiar institution of the mir-framed on the principle of community of ownership and occupation of the land--, the effect was not conducive to the growth of individual effort. In November 1906, however, the emperor Nicholas II promulgated a provisional order permitting the peasants to become freeholders of allotments made at the time of emancipation, all redemption dues being remitted. This measure, which was endorsed by the third Duma in an act passed on 21 December 1908, is calculated to have far-reaching and profound effects on the rural economy of Russia. Thirteen years previously the government had endeavored to secure greater fixity and permanence of tenure by providing that at least twelve years must elapse between every two redistributions of the land belonging to a mir amongst those entitled to share in it. The order of November 1906 had provided that the various strips of land held by each peasant should be merged into a single holding; the Duma, however, on the advice of the government, left this to the future, as an ideal that could only gradually be realized.

Censorship was heavy-handed until the reign of Alexander II, but it never went away. Newspapers were strictly limited in what they could publish, as intellectuals favored literary magazines for their publishing outlets. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for example, ridiculed the St. Petersburg newspapers, such as Golos and Peterburgskii Listok, which he accused of publishing trifles and distracting readers from the pressing social concerns of contemporary Russia through their obsession with spectacle and European popular culture.

Educational standards were very low in the Russian Empire. By 1800, the level of literacy among male peasants ranged from 1 to 12 percent and 20 to 25 percent for urban men. Literacy among women was very low. The rates were highest for the nobility (84 to 87 percent), merchants (over 75 percent), then the workers and peasants. Serfs were the least literate. In every group, women were far less literate than men. By contrast in Western Europe, urban men had about a 50 percent literacy rate. The Orthodox hierarchy was suspicious of education - they saw no religious need whatever for literacy. Peasants had no use for literacy, and people who did such as artisans, businessmen and professionals were few in number - as late as 1851, only 8% of Russians lived in cities.

The accession in 1801 of Alexander I (1801-1825) was widely welcomed as an opening to fresh liberal ideas from the European Enlightenment. Many reforms were promised, but few were actually carried out before 1820, when he turned his attention to foreign affairs and personal religion and ignored reform issues. In sharp contrast to Western Europe, the entire empire had a very small bureaucracy - about 17,000 public officials, most of whom lived in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Modernization of government required much larger numbers, but that in turn required an educational system that could provide suitable training. Russia lacked that, and for university education young men went to Western Europe. The Army and the church had their own training programs, narrowly focused on their particular needs. The most important successful reform under Alexander I came in the setting up a national system of education. The Ministry of Education was set up in 1802, and the country was divided into six educational regions. The long-term plan was for a university in every region, a secondary school in every major city, upgraded primary schools, and - for the largest number of students -a parish school for every two parishes. By 1825, the national government operated six universities, forty-eight secondary state schools, and 337 improved primary schools. Highly qualified teachers arrived from exile in France, where they fled the revolution. Exiled Jesuits set up elite boarding schools until their order was expelled in 1815. At the highest level, universities were set up on the German model in Kazan, Kharkov, St. Petersburg, Vilna and Dorpat, while the relatively young Imperial Moscow University was expanded. The higher forms of education were reserved for a very small elite, with only a few hundred students at the universities by 1825 and 5500 in the secondary schools. There were no schools open to girls. Most rich families still depended on private tutors.

Tsar Nicholas I was a reactionary who wanted to neutralize foreign ideas, especially those he ridiculed as "pseudo-knowledge." Nevertheless, his minister of education, Sergey Uvarov at the university level was able to promote more academic freedom for the faculty, who were under suspicion by reactionary church officials. He raised academic standards, improved facilities, and opened the admission doors a bit wider. Nicholas tolerated Uvarov's achievements until 1848, then reversed his innovations. For the rest of the century, the national government continued to focus on universities, and generally ignore elementary and secondary educational needs. By 1900 there were 17,000 university students, and over 30,000 were enrolled in specialized technical institutes. The students were conspicuous in Moscow and St. Petersburg as a political force typically at the forefront of demonstrations and disturbances. The majority of tertiary institutions in the empire used Russian, while some used other languages but underwent Russification.

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The Russian Empire was an empire that extended across Eurasia and North America from 1721, following the end of the Great Northern War, until the Republic was proclaimed by the Provisional Government that took power after the February Revolution of 1917. The House of Romanov ruled the Russian Empire from 1721 until 1762.

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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ( USSR), was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national republics; in practice, both its government and its economy were highly centralized until its final years. It was a one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with the city of Moscow serving as its capital as well as that of its largest and most populous republic: the Russian SFSR. Other major cities included Leningrad (Russian SFSR), Kiev ( Ukrainian SSR), Minsk ( Byelorussian SSR), Tashkent ( Uzbek SSR), Alma-Ata ( Kazakh SSR), and Novosibirsk (Russian SFSR). It was the largest country in the world, covering over 22,402,200 square kilometres (8,649,500 sq mi) and spanning eleven time zones.

The country's roots lay in the October Revolution of 1917, which saw the Bolsheviks overthrow the Russian Provisional Government that formed earlier that year following the February Revolution and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, marking the end of the Russian Empire. Following the coup, the Bolsheviks lead by Vladimir Lenin established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR), the world's first constitutionally guaranteed socialist state. Persisting internal tensions escalated into the brutal Russian Civil War. As the war progressed in the Bolsheviks' favor, the RSFSR began to incorporate land conquered from the war into nominally independent states, which were unified into the Soviet Union in December 1922. Following Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin came to power. Stalin inaugurated a period of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization that led to significant economic growth, but also contributed to a famine in 1930-1933 that killed millions. The forced labour camp system of the Gulag was also expanded in this period. Stalin conducted the Great Purge to remove his actual and perceived opponents. After the outbreak of World War II, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The combined Soviet civilian and military casualty count-estimated to be around 20 million people-accounted for the majority of losses of Allied forces. In the aftermath of World War II, the territory occupied by the Red Army formed various Soviet satellite states.

The beginning of the Cold War saw the Eastern Bloc of the Soviet Union confront the Western Bloc of the United States, with the latter grouping becoming largely united in 1949 under NATO and the former grouping becoming largely united in 1955 under the Warsaw Pact. As the Soviet Union already had an armed presence and political domination all over its eastern satellite states by 1955, the pact has been long considered "superfluous", and because of the rushed way in which it was conceived, NATO officials labeled it a "cardboard castle". There was no direct military confrontation between the two organizations; instead, the conflict was fought on an ideological basis and through proxy wars. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact led to the expansion of military forces and their integration into the respective blocs. The Warsaw Pact's largest military engagement was the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, its own member state, in August 1968 (with the participation of all pact nations except Albania and Romania), which, in part, resulted in Albania withdrawing from the pact less than one month later. Following Stalin's death in 1953, a period known as de-Stalinization occurred under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviets took an early lead in the Space Race with the first artificial satellite, the first human spaceflight, and the first probe to land on another planet ( Venus).

In the 1970s, there was a brief in the Soviet Union's relationship with the United States, but tensions resumed following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform the country through his policies of and perestroika. In 1989, during the closing stages of the Cold War, various countries of the Warsaw Pact overthrew their Marxist-Leninist regimes, which was accompanied by the outbreak of strong nationalist and separatist movements across the entire Soviet Union. In 1991, Gorbachev initiated a national referendum-boycotted by the Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova-that resulted in the majority of participating citizens voting in favour of preserving the country as a renewed federation. In August 1991, hardline members of the Communist Party staged a coup d'état against Gorbachev; the attempt failed, with Boris Yeltsin playing a high-profile role in facing down the unrest, and the Communist Party was subsequently banned. The Russian Federation became the Soviet Union's successor state, while all of the other republics emerged from the USSR's collapse as fully independent post-Soviet states.

The Soviet Union produced many significant social and technological achievements and innovations. It had the world's second-largest economy, and the Soviet Armed Forces comprised the largest standing military in the world. An NPT-designated state, it possessed the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. It was a founding member of the United Nations as well as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Before the dissolution, the country had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers through its hegemony in Eastern Europe, military and economic strengths and scientific research.

The word is derived from the Russian word * sovet (Russian: совет), meaning 'council', 'assembly', 'advice', ultimately deriving from the proto-Slavic verbal stem of vět-iti ('to inform'), related to Slavic věst ('news'), English wise, the root in ad-vis-or (which came to English through French), or the Dutch weten ('to know'; compare wetenschap meaning 'science'). The word sovietnik means 'councillor'. Some organizations in Russian history were called council (Russian: совет). In the Russian Empire, the State Council, which functioned from 1810 to 1917, was referred to as a Council of Ministers.

The Soviets as workers' councils first appeared during the Russian revolution of 1905. Although they were quickly suppressed by the Imperial army, after the February revolution of 1917, workers' and soldiers' Soviets emerged throughout the country, and shared power with the Russian Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, demanded that all power be transferred to the Soviets, and gained support from the workers and soldiers. After the October coup of 1917, where they seized power from the Provisional Government in the name of the Soviets, Lenin proclaimed the formation of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR).

During the Georgian Affair of 1922, Lenin called for the Russian SFSR and other national Soviet republics to form a greater union which he initially named as the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia (Russian: Союз Советских Республик Европы и Азии , Sojuz Sovjetskih Respublik Evropy i Azii). Joseph Stalin initially resisted Lenin's proposal but ultimately accepted it, and with Lenin's agreement he changed the name to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), although all republics began as socialist soviet and did not change to the other order until 1936. In addition, in the regional languages of several republics, the word council or conciliar in the respective language was only quite late changed to an adaptation of the Russian soviet and never in others, e.g. Ukrainian SSR.

(in the Latin alphabet: SSSR) is the abbreviation of the Russian language cognate of USSR, as written in Cyrillic letters. The Soviets used this abbreviation so frequently that audiences worldwide became familiar with its meaning. After this, the most common Russian initialization is (transliteration: Soyuz SSR) which, after compensating for grammatical differences, essentially translates to Union of SSRs in English. In addition, the Russian short form name Советский Союз (transliteration: Sovjetskij Sojuz, which literally means Soviet Union) is also commonly used, but only in its unabbreviated form. Since the start of the Great Patriotic War at the latest, abbreviating the Russian name of the Soviet Union as (in the same way as, for example, United States is abbreviated into US) has been a complete taboo, the reason being that as a Russian Cyrillic abbreviation is instead associated with the infamous Schutzstaffel of Nazi Germany, just as SS is in English. One apparent exception was the Russian abbreviation the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ( KPSS).

In English language media, the state was referred to as the Soviet Union or the USSR. In other European languages, the locally translated short forms and abbreviations are usually used such as Union soviétique and URSS in French, or Sowjetunion and UdSSR in German. The Russian SFSR dominated the Soviet Union to such an extent that for most of the Soviet Union's existence, it was commonly, but incorrectly, referred to as Russia. Technically, Russia itself was only one republic within the larger union - albeit by far the largest, most powerful and most highly developed of the 15 republics. Nevertheless, according to historian Matthew White, it was an open secret that the country's federal structure was "window dressing" for Russian dominance. For that reason, the people of the USSR were almost always called "Russians", not "Soviets", since "everyone knew who really ran the show".

The Soviet Union covered an area of over 22,402,200 square kilometres (8,649,500 sq mi), and was the world's largest country, a status that is retained by its successor state, Russia. It covered a sixth of Earth's land surface, and its size was comparable to the continent of North America. Its western part in Europe accounted for a quarter of the country's area and was the cultural and economic center. The eastern part in Asia extended to the Pacific Ocean to the east and Afghanistan to the south, and, except some areas in Central Asia, was much less populous. It spanned over 10,000 kilometres (6,200 mi) east to west across eleven time zones, and over 7,200 kilometres (4,500 mi) north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, taiga, steppes, desert and mountains.

The Soviet Union, similarly to modern Russia, had the world's longest border, measuring over 60,000 kilometres (37,000 mi), or circumferences of Earth. Two-thirds of it was a coastline. The country bordered (from 1945 to 1991): Norway, Finland, the Baltic Sea, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, the Black Sea, Turkey, Iran, the Caspian Sea, Afghanistan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea. The Bering Strait separated the country from the United States, while the La Pérouse Strait separated it from Japan.

The Soviet Union's highest mountain was Communism Peak (now Ismoil Somoni Peak) in Tajik SSR, at 7,495 metres (24,590 ft). It also included most of the world's largest lakes; the Caspian Sea (shared with Iran), and Lake Baikal in Russia, the world's largest and deepest freshwater lake.

Revolution and foundation (1917-1927)

Modern revolutionary activity in the Russian Empire began with the 1825 Decembrist revolt. Although serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was done on terms unfavourable to the peasants and served to encourage revolutionaries. A parliament-the State Duma-was established in 1906 after the Russian Revolution of 1905, but Emperor Nicholas II resisted attempts to move from absolute to a constitutional monarchy. Social unrest continued and was aggravated during World War I by military defeat and food shortages in major cities.

A spontaneous popular demonstration in Petrograd on 8 March 1917, demanding peace and bread, culminated in the February Revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II and the imperial government. The tsarist autocracy was replaced by the social-democratic Russian Provisional Government, which intended to conduct elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly and to continue fighting on the side of the Entente in World War I. At the same time, workers' councils, known in Russian as ' Soviets', sprang up across the country, and the most influential of them, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, shared power with the Provisional Government.

The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, pushed for communist revolution in the Soviets and on the streets, adopting the slogan of "All Power to the Soviets" and urging the overthrow of the Provisional Government. On 7 November 1917, Bolshevik Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, arresting the Provisional Government leaders and Lenin declared that all power was now transferred to the Soviets. This event would later be officially known in Soviet bibliographies as the " Great October Socialist Revolution". The bloody Red Terror was initiated to shut down all opposition, both perceived and real. In December, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Central Powers, though by February 1918, fighting had resumed. In March, the Soviets ended involvement in the war and signed the separate peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

A long and bloody Civil War ensued between the Reds and the Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds' victory. It included foreign intervention, the murder of the former Emperor and his family, and the famine of 1921-1922, which killed about five million people. In March 1921, during a related war against Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed, splitting disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia sought to re-conquer all newly independent nations of the former Empire, although their success was limited. Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania all repelled Soviet invasions, while Ukraine, Belarus (as a result of the Polish-Soviet War), Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia were occupied by the Red Army. Additionally, forced requisition of food by the Soviet government led to substantial resistance, of which the most notable was the Tambov Rebellion, ultimately put down by the Red Army.

The Civil War had a devastating impact on the economy. A black market emerged in Russia, despite the threat of martial law against profiteering. The ruble collapsed, with barter increasingly replacing money as a medium of exchange and, by 1921, heavy industry output had fallen to 20% of 1913 levels. 90% of wages were paid with goods rather than money. 70% of locomotives were in need of repair, and food requisitioning, combined with the effects of seven years of war and a severe drought, contributed to a famine that caused between 3 and 10 million deaths. Coal production decreased from 27.5 million tons (1913) to 7 million tons (1920), while overall factory production also declined from 10,000 million roubles to 1,000 million roubles. According to the noted historian David Christian, the grain harvest was also slashed from 80.1 million tons (1913) to 46.5 million tons (1920).

Treaty on the Creation of the USSR

On 28 December 1922, a conference of plenipotentiary delegations from the Russian SFSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR approved the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. These two documents were confirmed by the first Congress of Soviets of the USSR and signed by the heads of the delegations, Mikhail Kalinin, Mikhail Tskhakaya, Mikhail Frunze, Grigory Petrovsky and Alexander Chervyakov, on 30 December 1922. The formal proclamation was made from the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

An intensive restructuring of the economy, industry and politics of the country began in the early days of Soviet power in 1917. A large part of this was done according to the Bolshevik Initial Decrees, government documents signed by Vladimir Lenin. One of the most prominent breakthroughs was the GOELRO plan, which envisioned a major restructuring of the Soviet economy based on total electrification of Russia. The plan became the prototype for subsequent Five-Year Plans and was fulfilled by 1931. After the economic policy of ' War communism' during the Russian Civil War, as a prelude to fully developing socialism in the country, the Soviet government permitted some private enterprise to coexist alongside nationalized industry in the 1920s, and total food requisition in the countryside was replaced by a food tax.

From its creation, the government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The stated purpose was to prevent the return of capitalist exploitation, and that the principles of democratic centralism would be the most effective in representing the people's will in a practical manner. The debate over the future of the economy provided the background for a power struggle in the years after Lenin's death in 1924. Initially, Lenin was to be replaced by a ' troika' consisting of Grigory Zinoviev of the Ukrainian SSR, Lev Kamenev of the Russian SFSR, and Joseph Stalin of the Transcaucasian SFSR.

On 1 February 1924, the USSR was recognized by the United Kingdom. The same year, a Soviet Constitution was approved, legitimizing the December 1922 union.

According to Archie Brown the constitution was never an accurate guide to political reality in the USSR. For example the fact that the Party played the leading role in making and enforcing policy was not mentioned in it until 1977. The USSR was a federative entity of many constituent republics, each with its own political and administrative entities. However, the term 'Soviet Russia' - formally applicable only to the Russian Federative Socialist Republic - was often applied to the entire country by non-Soviet writers due to its domination by the Russian SFSR.

Stalin era (1927-1953)

On 3 April 1922, Stalin was named the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Lenin had appointed Stalin the head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, which gave Stalin considerable power. By gradually consolidating his influence and isolating and outmaneuvering his rivals within the party, Stalin became the undisputed leader of the country and, by the end of the 1920s, established a totalitarian rule. In October 1927, Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky were expelled from the Central Committee and forced into exile.

In 1928, Stalin introduced the first five-year plan for building a socialist economy. In place of the internationalism expressed by Lenin throughout the revolution, it aimed to build Socialism in One Country. In industry, the state assumed control over all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive program of industrialization. In agriculture, rather than adhering to the 'lead by example' policy advocated by Lenin, forced collectivization of farms was implemented all over the country.

Famines ensued as a result, causing deaths estimated at three to seven million; surviving kulaks (wealthy or middle-class peasants) were persecuted, and many were sent to Gulags to do forced labor. Social upheaval continued in the mid-1930s. Despite the turmoil of the mid-to-late 1930s, the country developed a robust industrial economy in the years preceding World War II.

Closer cooperation between the USSR and the West developed in the early 1930s. From 1932 to 1934, the country participated in the World Disarmament Conference. In 1933, diplomatic relations between the United States and the USSR were established when in November, the newly elected President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, chose to recognize Stalin's Communist government formally and negotiated a new trade agreement between the two countries. In September 1934, the country joined the League of Nations. After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the USSR actively supported the Republican forces against the Nationalists, who were supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

In December 1936, Stalin unveiled a new constitution that was praised by supporters around the world as the most democratic constitution imaginable, though there was some skepticism. American historian J. Arch Getty concludes: "Many who lauded Stalin's Soviet Union as the most democratic country on earth lived to regret their words. After all, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 was adopted on the eve of the Great Terror of the late 1930s; the "thoroughly democratic" elections to the first Supreme Soviet permitted only uncontested candidates and took place at the height of the savage violence in 1937. The civil rights, personal freedoms, and democratic forms promised in the Stalin constitution were trampled almost immediately and remained dead letters until long after Stalin's death." Stalin's Great Purge resulted in the detainment or execution of many ' Old Bolsheviks' who had participated in the October Revolution. According to declassified Soviet archives, the NKVD arrested more than one and a half million people in 1937 and 1938, of whom 681,692 were shot. Over those two years, there were an average of over one thousand executions a day.

In 1939, after attempts to form a military alliance with Britain and France against Germany failed, the Soviet Union made a dramatic shift towards Nazi Germany. Almost a year after Britain and France had concluded the Munich Agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union made agreements with Germany as well, both militarily and economically during extensive talks. Unlike the case of Britain and France, the Soviet Union's agreement with Germany, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (signed on 23 August 1939), included a secret protocol that paved the way for the Soviet invasion of Eastern European states and occupation of their territories. The pact made possible the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and eastern Poland.

On 1 September, Germany invaded Poland and on the 17th the Soviet Union invaded Poland as well. On 6 October, Poland fell and part of the Soviet occupation zone was then handed over to Germany.

On 10 October, the Soviet Union and Lithuania signed an agreement whereby the Soviet Union transferred Polish sovereignty over the Vilna region to Lithuania, and on 28 October the boundary between the Soviet occupation zone and the new territory of Lithuania was officially demarcated.

On 1 November, the Soviet Union annexed Western Ukraine, followed by Western Belarus on the 2nd.

In late November, unable to coerce the Republic of Finland by diplomatic means into moving its border 25 kilometres (16 mi) back from Leningrad, Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland. On 14 December 1939, the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations for invading Finland. In the east, the Soviet military won several decisive victories during border clashes with the Empire of Japan in 1938 and 1939. However, in April 1941, the USSR signed the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact with Japan, which the Soviets would unilaterally break in 1945, recognizing the territorial integrity of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state. The pact ensured Japan would not enter the war against the USSR on the side of Germany later.

World War II

Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 starting what is known in Russia and some other post-Soviet states as the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army stopped the seemingly invincible German Army at the Battle of Moscow. The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from late 1942 to early 1943, dealt a severe blow to Germany from which they never fully recovered and became a turning point in the war. After Stalingrad, Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surrendered in 1945. The German Army suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front. Harry Hopkins, a close foreign policy advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, spoke on 10 August 1943 of the USSR's decisive role in the war.

Soviet soldiers committed mass rapes in occupied territories, especially in Germany. The wartime rapes were followed by decades of silence. According to historian Antony Beevor, whose books were banned in 2015 from some Russian schools and colleges, NKVD (Soviet secret police) files have revealed that the leadership knew what was happening, but did little to stop it. It was often rear echelon units who committed the rapes. According to professor Oleg Rzheshevsky, "4,148 Red Army officers and many privates were punished for committing atrocities". The exact number of German women and girls raped by Soviet troops during the war and occupation is uncertain, but historians estimate their numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million.

The Soviet Union was greatly assisted in its wartime effort by the United States via Lend Lease. In total, the U.S. deliveries to the USSR through Lend-Lease amounted to $11 billion in materials: over 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, about 1,386 of which were M3 Lees and 4,102 M4 Shermans); 11,400 aircraft (of which 4,719 were Bell P-39 Airacobras, 3,414 were Douglas A-20 Havocs and 2,397 were Bell P-63 Kingcobras) and 1.75 million tons of food.

Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945. It has been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line.

The USSR, in fulfillment of its agreement with the Allies at the Yalta Conference, broke the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1945 which Japan had been honoring despite their alliance with Germany, and invaded Manchukuo and other Japan-controlled territories on 9 August 1945. This conflict ended with a decisive Soviet victory, contributing to the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.

The USSR suffered greatly in the war, losing around 20 million people (modern Russian sources put the number at 26.6 million). Approximately 2.8 million Soviet POWs died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions in just eight months of 1941-42. During the war, the country together with the United States, the United Kingdom and China were considered the Big Four Allied powers, and later became the Four Policemen that formed the basis of the United Nations Security Council. It emerged as a superpower in the post-war period. Once denied diplomatic recognition by the Western world, the USSR had official relations with practically every country by the late 1940s. A member of the United Nations at its foundation in 1945, the country became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, which gave it the right to veto any of its resolutions.

During the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union rebuilt and expanded its economy, while maintaining its strictly centralized control. It took effective control over most of the countries of Eastern Europe (except Yugoslavia and later Albania), turning them into satellite states. The USSR bound its satellite states in a military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955, and an economic organization, Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or Comecon, a counterpart to the European Economic Community (EEC), from 1949 to 1991. Although nominally a "defensive" alliance, the Warsaw Pact's primary function was to safeguard the Soviet Union's hegemony over its Eastern European satellites, with the Pact's only direct military actions having been the invasions of its own member states to keep them from breaking away. The USSR concentrated on its own recovery, seizing and transferring most of Germany's industrial plants, and it exacted war reparations from East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria using Soviet-dominated joint enterprises. It also instituted trading arrangements deliberately designed to favour the country. Moscow controlled the Communist parties that ruled the satellite states, and they followed orders from the Kremlin. Historian Mark Kramer concludes: "The net outflow of resources from eastern Europe to the Soviet Union was approximately $15 billion to $20 billion in the first decade after World War II, an amount roughly equal to the total aid provided by the United States to western Europe under the Marshall Plan." Later, the Comecon supplied aid to the eventually victorious Chinese Communist Party, and its influence grew elsewhere in the world. Fearing its ambitions, the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, became its enemies. In the ensuing Cold War, the two sides clashed indirectly in proxy wars.

De-Stalinization and Khrushchev Thaw (1953-1964)

Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Without a mutually agreeable successor, the highest Communist Party officials initially opted to rule the Soviet Union jointly through a troika headed by Georgy Malenkov. This did not last, however, and Nikita Khrushchev eventually won the ensuing power struggle by the mid-1950s. In 1956, he denounced Joseph Stalin and proceeded to ease controls over the party and society. This was known as de-Stalinization.

Moscow considered Eastern Europe to be a critically vital buffer zone for the forward defence of its western borders, in case of another major invasion such as the German invasion of 1941. For this reason, the USSR sought to cement its control of the region by transforming the Eastern European countries into satellite states, dependent upon and subservient to its leadership. As a result, Soviet military forces were used to suppress an anti-communist uprising in Hungary in 1956.

In the late 1950s, a confrontation with China regarding the Soviet rapprochement with the West, and what Mao Zedong perceived as Khrushchev's revisionism, led to the Sino-Soviet split. This resulted in a break throughout the global Marxist-Leninist movement, with the governments in Albania, Cambodia and Somalia choosing to ally with China.

During this period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the USSR continued to realize scientific and technological exploits in the Space Race, rivaling the United States: launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957; a living dog named Laika in 1957; the first human being, Yuri Gagarin in 1961; the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963; Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space in 1965; the first soft landing on the Moon by spacecraft Luna 9 in 1966; and the first Moon rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2.

Khrushchev initiated ' The Thaw', a complex shift in political, cultural and economic life in the country. This included some openness and contact with other nations and new social and economic policies with more emphasis on commodity goods, allowing a dramatic rise in living standards while maintaining high levels of economic growth. Censorship was relaxed as well. Khrushchev's reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive. In 1962, he precipitated a crisis with the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. An agreement was made with the United States to remove nuclear missiles from both Cuba and Turkey, concluding the crisis. This event caused Khrushchev much embarrassment and loss of prestige, resulting in his removal from power in 1964.

Era of Stagnation (1964-1985)

Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of collective leadership ensued, consisting of Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary, Alexei Kosygin as Premier and Nikolai Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium, lasting until Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent Soviet leader.

In 1968, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring reforms. In the aftermath, Brezhnev justified the invasion and previous military interventions, as well as any potential military interventions in the future, by introducing the Brezhnev Doctrine, which proclaimed any threat to Soviet rule in a Warsaw Pact state as a threat to all Warsaw Pact states, therefore justifying military intervention.

Brezhnev presided throughout with the West that resulted in treaties on armament control ( SALT I, SALT II, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) while at the same time building up Soviet military might.

In October 1977, the third Soviet Constitution was unanimously adopted. The prevailing mood of the Soviet leadership at the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was one of aversion to change. The long period of Brezhnev's rule had come to be dubbed one of 'standstill', with an ageing and ossified top political leadership. This period is also known as the Era of Stagnation, a period of adverse economic, political, and social effects in the country, which began during the rule of Brezhnev and continued under his successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko.

In late 1979, the Soviet Union's military intervened in the ongoing civil war in neighboring Afghanistan, effectively ending a détente with the West.

Perestroika and Glasnost reforms (1985-1991)

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. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in that the Reagan administration encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil to the point where the Soviets could not make a profit selling their oil, and resulted in the depletion of the country's hard currency reserves.

Brezhnev's next two successors, transitional figures with deep roots in his tradition, did not last long. Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and Konstantin Chernenko 72 when they assumed power; both died in less than two years. In an attempt to avoid a third short-lived leader, in 1985, the Soviets turned to the next generation and selected Mikhail Gorbachev. He made significant changes in the economy and party leadership, called perestroika. His policy of freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship. Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the USSR abandoned its war in Afghanistan and began to withdraw its forces. In the following year, Gorbachev refused to interfere in the internal affairs of the Soviet satellite states, which paved the way for the Revolutions of 1989. In particular, the standstill of the Soviet Union at the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 then set a peaceful chain reaction in motion, at the end of which the Eastern Bloc collapsed. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and with East and West Germany pursuing re-unification, the Iron Curtain between the West and Soviet-occupied regions came down.

At the same time, the Soviet republics started legal moves towards potentially declaring sovereignty over their territories, citing the freedom to secede in Article 72 of the USSR constitution. On 7 April 1990, a law was passed allowing a republic to secede if more than two-thirds of its residents voted for it in a referendum. Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as the ' War of Laws'. In 1989, the Russian SFSR convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected its chairman. On 12 June 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the Soviet laws. After a landslide victory of Sąjūdis in Lithuania, that country declared its independence restored on 11 March 1990, citing the illegality of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. Soviet forces attempted to halt the secession by crushing popular demonstrations in Lithuania ( Bloody Sunday) and Latvia ( The Barricades), as a result of which numerous civilians were killed or wounded. However, these actions only bolstered international support for the secessionists.

A referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on 17 March 1991 in nine republics (the remainder having boycotted the vote), with the majority of the population in those republics voting for preservation of the Union in the form of a new federation. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost. In the summer of 1991, the New Union Treaty, which would have turned the country into a much looser Union, was agreed upon by eight republics. The signing of the treaty, however, was interrupted by the August Coup-an attempted coup d'état by hardline members of the government and the KGB who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed, Russian president Yeltsin was seen as a hero for his decisive actions, while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power tipped significantly towards the republics. In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia immediately declared the restoration of their full independence (following Lithuania's 1990 example). Gorbachev resigned as general secretary in late August, and soon afterwards, the party's activities were indefinitely suspended-effectively ending its rule. By the fall, Gorbachev could no longer influence events outside Moscow, and he was being challenged even there by Yeltsin, who had been elected President of Russia in July 1991.

Dissolution and aftermath

The remaining 12 republics continued discussing new, increasingly looser, models of the Union. However, by December all except Russia and Kazakhstan had formally declared independence. During this time, Yeltsin took over what remained of the Soviet government, including the Moscow Kremlin. The final blow was struck on 1 December when Ukraine, the second-most powerful republic, voted overwhelmingly for independence. Ukraine's secession ended any realistic chance of the country staying together even on a limited scale.

On 8 December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (formerly Byelorussia), signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. While doubts remained over the authority of the accords to do this, on 21 December 1991, the representatives of all Soviet republics except Georgia signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which confirmed the accords. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as the President of the USSR, declaring the office extinct. He turned the powers that had been vested in the presidency over to Yeltsin. That night, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time, and the Russian tricolour was raised in its place.

The following day, the Supreme Soviet, the highest governmental body, voted both itself and the country out of existence. This is generally recognized as marking the official, final dissolution of the Soviet Union as a functioning state, and the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Army initially remained under overall CIS command but was soon absorbed into the different military forces of the newly independent states. The few remaining Soviet institutions that had not been taken over by Russia ceased to function by the end of 1991.

Following the dissolution, Russia was internationally recognized as the USSR's legal successor on the international stage. To that end, Russia voluntarily accepted all Soviet foreign debt and claimed Soviet overseas properties as its own. Under the 1992 Lisbon Protocol, Russia also agreed to receive all nuclear weapons remaining in the territory of other former Soviet republics. Since then, the Russian Federation has assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations, and is widely viewed as the USSR's successor state. Ukraine has refused to recognize exclusive Russian claims to succession of the USSR and claimed such status for Ukraine as well, which was codified in Articles 7 and 8 of its 1991 law On Legal Succession of Ukraine. Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has continued to pursue claims against Russia in foreign courts, seeking to recover its share of the foreign property that was owned by the USSR.

In summing up the international ramifications of these events, Vladislav Zubok stated: 'The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological, and economic significance.' Before the dissolution, the country had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades after World War II through its hegemony in Eastern Europe, military strength, economic strength and scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.

Post-Soviet states

The analysis of the succession of states for the 15 post-Soviet states is complex. The Russian Federation is widely seen as the legal continuator state and is for most purposes the heir to the Soviet Union. It retained ownership of all former Soviet embassy properties, inheriting the full Soviet nuclear arsenal, and also inherited the Soviet Union's UN membership, with its permanent seat on the Security Council.

Of the two other co-founding states of the USSR at the time of the dissolution, Ukraine was the only one that had passed laws, similar to Russia, claiming it is a state-successor of both the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR. Soviet treaties laid groundwork for Ukraine's future foreign agreements as well as leading to the country agreeing to undertake 16.37% of debts of the Soviet Union for which it was going to receive its share of the USSR's foreign property. Russia's position as the 'only continuation of the USSR' that became widely accepted in the West, as well as constant pressure from the Western countries, allowed Russia to inherit Soviet state property abroad and conceal information about it. Due to that Ukraine never ratified 'zero option' agreement that Russian Federation had signed with other former Soviet republics, as it denied disclosing of information about Soviet Gold Reserves and its Diamond Fund. The dispute over former Soviet property and assets between the two former republics is still ongoing:

The conflict is unsolvable. We can continue to poke Kiev handouts in the calculation of 'solve the problem', only it won't be solved. Going to a trial is also pointless: for a number of European countries this is a political issue, and they will make a decision clearly in whose favor. What to do in this situation is an open question. Search for non-trivial solutions. But we must remember that in 2014, with the filing of the then Ukrainian Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, litigation with Russia resumed in 32 countries.

Similar situation occurred with restitution of cultural property. Although on 14 February 1992 Russia and other former Soviet republics signed agreement 'On the return of cultural and historic property to the origin states' in Minsk, it was halted by the Russian State Duma that eventually passed ' Federal Law on Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation' which made restitution currently impossible, effectively barring the return of looted cultural heritage by Soviet troops during the Second World War to its original owners.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania consider themselves as revivals of the three independent countries that existed prior to their occupation and annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940. They maintain that the process by which they were incorporated into the Soviet Union violated both international law and their own law, and that in 1990-1991 they were reasserting an independence that still legally existed.

There are additionally six states that claim independence from the other internationally recognized post-Soviet states but possess limited international recognition: Abkhazia, Artsakh, Donetsk, Luhansk, South Ossetia and Transnistria. The Chechen separatist movement of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, the Gagauz separatist movement of the Gagauz Republic and the Talysh separatist movement of the Talysh-Mughan Autonomous Republic lack any international recognition.

Foreign relations

During his rule, Stalin always made the final policy decisions. Otherwise, Soviet foreign policy was set by the commission on the Foreign Policy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or by the party's highest body the Politburo. Operations were handled by the separate Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was known as the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (or Narkomindel), until 1946. The most influential spokesmen were Georgy Chicherin (1872-1936), Maxim Litvinov (1876-1951), Vyacheslav Molotov (1890-1986), Andrey Vyshinsky (1883-1954) and Andrei Gromyko (1909-1989). Intellectuals were based in the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

Comintern (1919-1943), or Communist International, was an international communist organization based in the Kremlin that advocated world communism. The Comintern intended to 'struggle by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state'. It was abolished as a conciliatory measure toward Britain and the United States.

Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Russian: Совет Экономической Взаимопомощи, Sovet Ekonomicheskoy Vzaimopomoshchi, СЭВ, SEV) was an economic organization from 1949 to 1991 under Soviet control that comprised the countries of the Eastern Bloc along with several communist states elsewhere in the world. Moscow was concerned about the Marshall Plan, and Comecon was meant to prevent countries in the Soviets' sphere of influence from moving towards that of the Americans and Southeast Asia. Comecon was the Eastern Bloc's reply to the formation in Western Europe of the Organization for European Economic Co-Operation (OEEC),

The Warsaw Pact was a collective defence alliance formed in 1955 among the USSR and its satellite states in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was the military complement to the Comecon, the regional economic organization for the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Pact was created in reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO. Although nominally a "defensive" alliance, the Pact's primary function was to safeguard the Soviet Union's hegemony over its Eastern European satellites, with the Pact's only direct military actions having been the invasions of its own member states to keep them from breaking away.

The Cominform (1947-1956), informally the Communist Information Bureau and officially the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties, was the first official agency of the international Marxist-Leninist movement since the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. Its role was to coordinate actions between Marxist-Leninist parties under Soviet direction. Stalin used it to order Western European communist parties to abandon their exclusively parliamentarian line and instead concentrate on politically impeding the operations of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. program of rebuilding Europe after the war and developing its economy. It also coordinated international aid to Marxist-Leninist insurgents during the Greek Civil War in 1947-1949. It expelled Yugoslavia in 1948 after Josip Broz Tito insisted on an independent program. Its newspaper, For a Lasting Peace, for a People's Democracy!, promoted Stalin's positions. The Cominform's concentration on Europe meant a deemphasis on world revolution in Soviet foreign policy. By enunciating a uniform ideology, it allowed the constituent parties to focus on personalities rather than issues.

Early policies (1919-1939)

The Marxist-Leninist leadership of the Soviet Union intensely debated foreign policy issues and changed directions several times. Even after Stalin assumed dictatorial control in the late 1920s, there were debates, and he frequently changed positions.

During the country's early period, it was assumed that Communist revolutions would break out soon in every major industrial country, and it was the Russian responsibility to assist them. The Comintern was the weapon of choice. A few revolutions did break out, but they were quickly suppressed (the longest lasting one was in Hungary)-the Hungarian Soviet Republic -lasted only from 21 March 1919 to 1 August 1919. The Russian Bolsheviks were in no position to give any help.

By 1921, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin realized that capitalism had stabilized itself in Europe and there would not be any widespread revolutions anytime soon. It became the duty of the Russian Bolsheviks to protect what they had in Russia, and avoid military confrontations that might destroy their bridgehead. Russia was now a pariah state, along with Germany. The two came to terms in 1922 with the Treaty of Rapallo that settled long-standing grievances. At the same time, the two countries secretly set up training programs for the illegal German army and air force operations at hidden camps in the USSR.

Moscow eventually stopped threatening other states, and instead worked to open peaceful relationships in terms of trade, and diplomatic recognition. The United Kingdom dismissed the warnings of Winston Churchill and a few others about a continuing Marxist-Leninist threat, and opened trade relations and de facto diplomatic recognition in 1922. There was hope for a settlement of the pre-war Tsarist debts, but it was repeatedly postponed. Formal recognition came when the new Labour Party came to power in 1924. All the other countries followed suit in opening trade relations. Henry Ford opened large-scale business relations with the Soviets in the late 1920s, hoping that it would lead to long-term peace. Finally, in 1933, the United States officially recognized the USSR, a decision backed by the public opinion and especially by US business interests that expected an opening of a new profitable market.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin ordered Marxist-Leninist parties across the world to strongly oppose non-Marxist political parties, labor unions or other organizations on the left, which they labelled social fascists. In the usage of the Soviet Union, and of the Comintern and its affiliated parties in this period, the epithet was used to describe capitalist society in general and virtually any anti-Soviet or anti-Stalinist activity or opinion. Stalin reversed himself in 1934 with the Popular Front program that called on all Marxist parties to join with all anti-Fascist political, labor, and organizational forces that were opposed to fascism, especially of the Nazi variety.

In 1939, half a year after the Munich Agreement, the USSR attempted to form an anti-Nazi alliance with France and Britain. Adolf Hitler proposed a better deal, which would give the USSR control over much of Eastern Europe through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In September, Germany invaded Poland, and the USSR also invaded later that month, resulting in the partition of Poland. In response, Britain and France declared war on Germany, marking the beginning of World War II.

World War II (1939-1945)

Up until his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin controlled all foreign relations of the Soviet Union during the interwar period. Despite the increasing build-up of Germany's war machine and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Soviet Union did not cooperate with any other nation, choosing to follow its own path. However, after Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union's priorities changed. Despite previous conflict with the United Kingdom, Vyacheslav Molotov dropped his post war border demands.

Cold War (1945-1991)

The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, which began following World War II in 1945. The term is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two superpowers, but they each supported major regional conflicts known as proxy wars. The conflict was based around the ideological and geopolitical struggle for global influence by these two superpowers, following their temporary alliance and victory against Nazi Germany in 1945. Aside from the nuclear arsenal development and conventional military deployment, the struggle for dominance was expressed via indirect means such as psychological warfare, propaganda campaigns, espionage, far-reaching embargoes, rivalry at sports events and technological competitions such as the Space Race.

There were three power hierarchies in the Soviet Union: the legislature represented by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the government represented by the Council of Ministers, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the only legal party and the final policymaker in the country.

Communist Party

At the top of the Communist Party was the Central Committee, elected at Party Congresses and Conferences. In turn, the Central Committee voted for a Politburo (called the Presidium between 1952 and 1966), Secretariat and the general secretary (First Secretary from 1953 to 1966), the de facto highest office in the Soviet Union. Depending on the degree of power consolidation, it was either the Politburo as a collective body or the General Secretary, who always was one of the Politburo members, that effectively led the party and the country (except for the period of the highly personalized authority of Stalin, exercised directly through his position in the Council of Ministers rather than the Politburo after 1941). They were not controlled by the general party membership, as the key principle of the party organization was democratic centralism, demanding strict subordination to higher bodies, and elections went uncontested, endorsing the candidates proposed from above.

The Communist Party maintained its dominance over the state mainly through its control over the system of appointments. All senior government officials and most deputies of the Supreme Soviet were members of the CPSU. Of the party heads themselves, Stalin (1941-1953) and Khrushchev (1958-1964) were Premiers. Upon the forced retirement of Khrushchev, the party leader was prohibited from this kind of double membership, but the later General Secretaries for at least some part of their tenure occupied the mostly ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal head of state. The institutions at lower levels were overseen and at times supplanted by primary party organizations.

However, in practice the degree of control the party was able to exercise over the state bureaucracy, particularly after the death of Stalin, was far from total, with the bureaucracy pursuing different interests that were at times in conflict with the party, nor was the party itself monolithic from top to bottom, although factions were officially banned.

Government

The Supreme Soviet (successor of the Congress of Soviets) was nominally the highest state body for most of the Soviet history, at first acting as a rubber stamp institution, approving and implementing all decisions made by the party. However, its powers and functions were extended in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, including the creation of new state commissions and committees. It gained additional powers relating to the approval of the Five-Year Plans and the government budget. The Supreme Soviet elected a Presidium (successor of the Central Executive Committee) to wield its power between plenary sessions, ordinarily held twice a year, and appointed the Supreme Court, the Procurator General and the Council of Ministers (known before 1946 as the Council of People's Commissars), headed by the Chairman (Premier) and managing an enormous bureaucracy responsible for the administration of the economy and society. State and party structures of the constituent republics largely emulated the structure of the central institutions, although the Russian SFSR, unlike the other constituent republics, for most of its history had no republican branch of the CPSU, being ruled directly by the union-wide party until 1990. Local authorities were organized likewise into party committees, local Soviets and executive committees. While the state system was nominally federal, the party was unitary.

The state security police (the KGB and its predecessor agencies) played an important role in Soviet politics. It was instrumental in the Red Terror and Great Purge, but was brought under strict party control after Stalin's death. Under Yuri Andropov, the KGB engaged in the suppression of political dissent and maintained an extensive network of informers, reasserting itself as a political actor to some extent independent of the party-state structure, culminating in the anti-corruption campaign targeting high-ranking party officials in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Separation of power and reform

The constitution, which was promulgated in 1924, 1936 and 1977, did not limit state power. No formal separation of powers existed between the Party, Supreme Soviet and Council of Ministers that represented executive and legislative branches of the government. The system was governed less by statute than by informal conventions, and no settled mechanism of leadership succession existed. Bitter and at times deadly power struggles took place in the Politburo after the deaths of Lenin and Stalin, as well as after Khrushchev's dismissal, itself due to a decision by both the Politburo and the Central Committee. All leaders of the Communist Party before Gorbachev died in office, except Georgy Malenkov and Khrushchev, both dismissed from the party leadership amid internal struggle within the party.

Between 1988 and 1990, facing considerable opposition, Mikhail Gorbachev enacted reforms shifting power away from the highest bodies of the party and making the Supreme Soviet less dependent on them. The Congress of People's Deputies was established, the majority of whose members were directly elected in competitive elections held in March 1989, the first in Soviet history. The Congress now elected the Supreme Soviet, which became a full-time parliament, and much stronger than before. For the first time since the 1920s, it refused to rubber stamp proposals from the party and Council of Ministers. In 1990, Gorbachev introduced and assumed the position of the President of the Soviet Union, concentrated power in his executive office, independent of the party, and subordinated the government, now renamed the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR, to himself.

Tensions grew between the Union-wide authorities under Gorbachev, reformists led in Russia by Boris Yeltsin and controlling the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR, and communist hardliners. On 19-21 August 1991, a group of hardliners staged a coup attempt. The coup failed, and the State Council of the Soviet Union became the highest organ of state power 'in the period of transition'. Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary, only remaining President for the final months of the existence of the USSR.

Judicial system

The judiciary was not independent of the other branches of government. The Supreme Court supervised the lower courts ( People's Court) and applied the law as established by the constitution or as interpreted by the Supreme Soviet. The Constitutional Oversight Committee reviewed the constitutionality of laws and acts. The Soviet Union used the inquisitorial system of Roman law, where the judge, procurator, and defence attorney collaborate to "establish the truth".

Administrative divisions

Constitutionally, the USSR was a federation of constituent Union Republics, which were either unitary states, such as Ukraine or Byelorussia (SSRs), or federations, such as Russia or Transcaucasia (SFSRs), all four being the founding republics who signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR in December 1922. In 1924, during the national delimitation in Central Asia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were formed from parts of Russia's Turkestan ASSR and two Soviet dependencies, the Khorezm and Bukharan PSPs. In 1929, Tajikistan was split off from the Uzbekistan SSR. With the constitution of 1936, the Transcaucasian SFSR was dissolved, resulting in its constituent republics of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan being elevated to Union Republics, while Kazakhstan and Kirghizia were split off from the Russian SFSR, resulting in the same status. In August 1940, Moldavia was formed from parts of Ukraine and Soviet-occupied Bessarabia, and Ukrainian SSR. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were also annexed by the Soviet Union and turned into SSRs, which was not recognized by most of the international community and was considered an illegal occupation. After the Soviet invasion of Finland, the Karelo-Finnish SSR was formed on annexed territory as a Union Republic in March 1940 and then incorporated into Russia as the Karelian ASSR in 1956. Between July 1956 and September 1991, there were 15 union republics (see map below).

While nominally a union of equals, in practice the Soviet Union was dominated by Russians. The domination was so absolute that for most of its existence, the country was commonly (but incorrectly) referred to as 'Russia'. While the Russian SFSR was technically only one republic within the larger union, it was by far the largest (both in terms of population and area), most powerful, and most highly developed. The Russian SFSR was also the industrial center of the Soviet Union. Historian Matthew White wrote that it was an open secret that the country's federal structure was 'window dressing' for Russian dominance. For that reason, the people of the USSR were usually called 'Russians', not 'Soviets', since 'everyone knew who really ran the show'.

Under the Military Law of September 1925, the Soviet Armed Forces consisted of the Land Forces, the Air Force, the Navy, Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) and the Internal Troops. The OGPU later became independent and in 1934 joined the NKVD secret police, and so its internal troops were under the joint leadership of the defense and internal commissariats. After World War II, Strategic Missile Forces (1959), Air Defense Forces (1948) and National Civil Defense Forces (1970) were formed, which ranked first, third, and sixth in the official Soviet system of importance (ground forces were second, Air Force fourth, and Navy fifth).

The army had the greatest political influence. In 1989, there served two million soldiers divided between 150 motorized and 52 armored divisions. Until the early 1960s, the Soviet navy was a rather small military branch, but after the Caribbean crisis, under the leadership of Sergei Gorshkov, it expanded significantly. It became known for battlecruisers and submarines. In 1989, there served 500 000 men. The Soviet Air Force focused on a fleet of strategic bombers and during war situation was to eradicate enemy infrastructure and nuclear capacity. The air force also had a number of fighters and tactical bombers to support the army in the war. Strategic missile forces had more than 1,400 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed between 28 bases and 300 command centers.

In the post-war period, the Soviet Army was directly involved in several military operations abroad. These included the suppression of the uprising in East Germany (1953), Hungarian revolution (1956) and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968). The Soviet Union also participated in the war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989.

In the Soviet Union, general conscription applied, meaning all able-bodied males aged 18 and older were drafted in the armed forces.

Space program

At the end of the 1950s, the USSR constructed the first satellite - Sputnik 1, which marked the beginning of the Space Race, a competition to achieve superior spaceflight capability with the United States. This was followed by other successful satellites, most notably Sputnik 5, where test dogs were sent to space. On 12 April 1961, the USSR launched Vostok 1, which carried Yuri Gagarin, making him the first human to ever be launched into space and complete a space journey. At that time, the first plans for space shuttles and orbital stations were drawn up in Soviet design offices, but in the end personal disputes between designers and management prevented this.

As for Lunar space program, the USSR only had a program on automated spacecraft launches with no crewed spacecraft used, passing on the 'Moon Race' part of Space Race, which was decidedly won by the Americans. The public's reaction to American astronauts' moon-landing in the Soviet Union was mixed. The Soviet government limited the release of information about the lunar landing, which affected the reaction. A portion of the populace did not give it any attention, and another portion was angered by it.

In the 1970s, specific proposals for the design of the space shuttle began to emerge, but shortcomings, especially in the electronics industry (rapid overheating of electronics), postponed the program until the end of the 1980s. The first shuttle, the Buran, flew in 1988, but without a human crew. Another shuttle, , eventually ended up under prolonged construction, as the shuttle project was canceled in 1991. For their launch into space, there is today an unused superpower rocket, Energia, which is the most powerful in the world.

In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union managed to build the orbital station. It was built on the construction of Salyut stations and its only role was civilian-grade research tasks. Mir was the only orbital station in operation from 1986 to 1998. Gradually, other modules were added to it, including American ones. However, the station deteriorated rapidly after a fire on board, so in 2001 it was decided to bring it into the atmosphere where it burned down.

Human rights

Human rights in the Soviet Union were severely limited. The Soviet Union was a totalitarian state from 1927 until 1953 and a one-party state until 1990. Freedom of speech was suppressed and dissent was punished. Independent political activities were not tolerated, whether these involved participation in free labor unions, private corporations, independent churches or opposition political parties. The freedom of movement within and especially outside the country was limited. The state restricted rights of citizens to private property.

The Soviet conception of human rights was very different from international law. According to Soviet legal theory, "it is the government who is the beneficiary of human rights which are to be asserted against the individual". The Soviet state was considered as the source of human rights. Therefore, the Soviet legal system regarded law as an arm of politics and courts as agencies of the government. Extensive extra-judicial powers were given to the Soviet secret police agencies. The Soviet government in practice significantly curbed the rule of law, civil liberties, protection of law, freedom of movement and guarantees of property, which were considered as examples of "bourgeois morality" by Soviet law theorists such as Andrey Vyshinsky. According to Vladimir Lenin, the purpose of socialist courts was "not to eliminate terror ... but to substantiate it and legitimize it in principle".

The Soviet Union signed legally-binding human rights documents, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1973, but they were neither widely known or accessible to people living under Communist rule, nor were they taken seriously by the Communist authorities.

The Soviet Union adopted a command economy, whereby production and distribution of goods were centralized and directed by the government. The first Bolshevik experience with a command economy was the policy of war communism, which involved the nationalization of industry, centralized distribution of output, coercive or forced requisition of agricultural production, and attempts to eliminate money circulation, private enterprises and free trade. The barrier troops were also used to enforce Bolshevik control over food supplies in areas controlled by the Red Army, a role which soon earned them the hatred of the Russian civilian population. After the severe economic collapse, Lenin replaced war communism by the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, legalizing free trade and private ownership of small businesses. The economy steadily recovered as a result.

After a long debate among the members of the Politburo about the course of economic development, by 1928-1929, upon gaining control of the country, Stalin abandoned the NEP and pushed for full central planning, starting forced collectivization of agriculture and enacting draconian labor legislation. Resources were mobilized for rapid industrialization, which significantly expanded Soviet capacity in heavy industry and capital goods during the 1930s. The primary motivation for industrialization was preparation for war, mostly due to distrust of the outside capitalist world. As a result, the USSR was transformed from a largely agrarian economy into a great industrial power, leading the way for its emergence as a superpower after World War II. The war caused extensive devastation of the Soviet economy and infrastructure, which required massive reconstruction.

By the early 1940s, the Soviet economy had become relatively self-sufficient; for most of the period until the creation of Comecon, only a tiny share of domestic products was traded internationally. After the creation of the Eastern Bloc, external trade rose rapidly. However, the influence of the world economy on the USSR was limited by fixed domestic prices and a state monopoly on foreign trade. Grain and sophisticated consumer manufactures became major import articles from around the 1960s. During the arms race of the Cold War, the Soviet economy was burdened by military expenditures, heavily lobbied for by a powerful bureaucracy dependent on the arms industry. At the same time, the USSR became the largest arms exporter to the Third World. A portion of Soviet resources during the Cold War were allocated in aid to the Soviet-aligned states. The Soviet Union's military budget in the 1970s was gigantic, forming 40-60% of the entire federal budget and accounting to 15% of the USSR's GDP (13% in the 1980s).

From the 1930s until its dissolution in late 1991, the way the Soviet economy operated remained essentially unchanged. The economy was formally directed by central planning, carried out by Gosplan and organized in five-year plans. However, in practice, the plans were highly aggregated and provisional, subject to ad hoc intervention by superiors. All critical economic decisions were taken by the political leadership. Allocated resources and plan targets were usually denominated in rubles rather than in physical goods. Credit was discouraged, but widespread. The final allocation of output was achieved through relatively decentralized, unplanned contracting. Although in theory prices were legally set from above, in practice they were often negotiated, and informal horizontal links (e.g. between producer factories) were widespread.

A number of basic services were state-funded, such as education and health care. In the manufacturing sector, heavy industry and defence were prioritized over consumer goods. Consumer goods, particularly outside large cities, were often scarce, of poor quality and limited variety. Under the command economy, consumers had almost no influence on production, and the changing demands of a population with growing incomes could not be satisfied by supplies at rigidly fixed prices. A massive unplanned second economy grew up at low levels alongside the planned one, providing some of the goods and services that the planners could not. The legalization of some elements of the decentralized economy was attempted with the reform of 1965.

Although statistics of the Soviet economy are notoriously unreliable and its economic growth difficult to estimate precisely, by most accounts, the economy continued to expand until the mid-1980s. During the 1950s and 1960s, it had comparatively high growth and was catching up to the West. However, after 1970, the growth, while still positive, steadily declined much more quickly and consistently than in other countries, despite a rapid increase in the capital stock (the rate of capital increase was only surpassed by Japan).

Overall, the growth rate of per capita income in the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1989 was slightly above the world average (based on 102 countries). A 1986 study published in the American Journal of Public Health claimed that, citing World Bank data, the Soviet model provided a better quality of life and human development than market economies at the same level of economic development in most cases. According to Stanley Fischer and William Easterly, growth could have been faster. By their calculation, per capita income in 1989 should have been twice higher than it was, considering the amount of investment, education and population. The authors attribute this poor performance to the low productivity of capital. Steven Rosefielde states that the standard of living declined due to Stalin's despotism. While there was a brief improvement after his death, it lapsed into stagnation.

In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform and revitalize the economy with his program of perestroika. His policies relaxed state control over enterprises but did not replace it by market incentives, resulting in a sharp decline in output. The economy, already suffering from reduced petroleum export revenues, started to collapse. Prices were still fixed, and the property was still largely state-owned until after the country's dissolution. For most of the period after World War II until its collapse, Soviet GDP ( PPP) was the second-largest in the world, and third during the second half of the 1980s, although on a per-capita basis, it was behind that of First World countries. Compared to countries with similar per-capita GDP in 1928, the Soviet Union experienced significant growth.

In 1990, the country had a Human Development Index of 0.920, placing it in the 'high' category of human development. It was the third-highest in the Eastern Bloc, behind Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and the 25th in the world of 130 countries.

The need for fuel declined in the Soviet Union from the 1970s to the 1980s, both per ruble of gross social product and per ruble of industrial product. At the start, this decline grew very rapidly but gradually slowed down between 1970 and 1975. From 1975 and 1980, it grew even slower, only 2.6%. David Wilson, a historian, believed that the gas industry would account for 40% of Soviet fuel production by the end of the century. His theory did not come to fruition because of the USSR's collapse. The USSR, in theory, would have continued to have an economic growth rate of 2-2.5% during the 1990s because of Soviet energy fields. However, the energy sector faced many difficulties, among them the country's high military expenditure and hostile relations with the First World.

In 1991, the Soviet Union had a pipeline network of 82,000 kilometres (51,000 mi) for crude oil and another 206,500 kilometres (128,300 mi) for natural gas. Petroleum and petroleum-based products, natural gas, metals, wood, agricultural products, and a variety of manufactured goods, primarily machinery, arms and military equipment, were exported. In the 1970s and 1980s, the USSR heavily relied on fossil fuel exports to earn hard currency. At its peak in 1988, it was the largest producer and second-largest exporter of crude oil, surpassed only by Saudi Arabia.

Science and technology

The Soviet Union placed great emphasis on science and technology within its economy, however, the most remarkable Soviet successes in technology, such as producing the world's first space satellite, typically were the responsibility of the military. Lenin believed that the USSR would never overtake the developed world if it remained as technologically backward as it was upon its founding. Soviet authorities proved their commitment to Lenin's belief by developing massive networks, research and development organizations. In the early 1960s, the Soviets awarded 40% of chemistry PhDs to women, compared to only 5% in the United States. By 1989, Soviet scientists were among the world's best-trained specialists in several areas, such as Energy physics, selected areas of medicine, mathematics, welding and military technologies. Due to rigid state planning and bureaucracy, the Soviets remained far behind technologically in chemistry, biology, and computers when compared to the First World. The Soviet government opposed and persecuted geneticists in favour of Lysenkoism, a pseudoscience rejected by the scientific community in the Soviet Union and abroad but supported by Stalin's inner circles. Implemented in the USSR and China, it resulted in reduced crop yields and is widely believed to have contributed to the Great Chinese Famine. The Soviet Union also had more scientists and engineers, relative to the world population, than any other major country due to the strong levels of state support for scientific developments by the 1980s.

Under the Reagan administration, Project Socrates determined that the Soviet Union addressed the acquisition of science and technology in a manner that was radically different from what the US was using. In the case of the US, economic prioritization was being used for indigenous research and development as the means to acquire science and technology in both the private and public sectors. In contrast, the USSR was offensively and defensively maneuvering in the acquisition and use of the worldwide technology, to increase the competitive advantage that they acquired from the technology while preventing the US from acquiring a competitive advantage. However, technology-based planning was executed in a centralized, government-centric manner that greatly hindered its flexibility. This was exploited by the US to undermine the strength of the Soviet Union and thus foster its reform.

Transport was a vital component of the country's economy. The economic centralization of the late 1920s and 1930s led to the development of infrastructure on a massive scale, most notably the establishment of Aeroflot, an aviation enterprise. The country had a wide variety of modes of transport by land, water and air. However, due to inadequate maintenance, much of the road, water and Soviet civil aviation transport were outdated and technologically backward compared to the First World.

Soviet rail transport was the largest and most intensively used in the world; it was also better developed than most of its Western counterparts. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet economists were calling for the construction of more roads to alleviate some of the burdens from the railways and to improve the Soviet government budget. The street network and automotive industry remained underdeveloped, and dirt roads were common outside major cities. Soviet maintenance projects proved unable to take care of even the few roads the country had. By the early-to-mid-1980s, the Soviet authorities tried to solve the road problem by ordering the construction of new ones. Meanwhile, the automobile industry was growing at a faster rate than road construction. The underdeveloped road network led to a growing demand for public transport.

Despite improvements, several aspects of the transport sector were still riddled with problems due to outdated infrastructure, lack of investment, corruption and bad decision-making. Soviet authorities were unable to meet the growing demand for transport infrastructure and services.

The Soviet merchant navy was one of the largest in the world.

Demographics

Excess deaths throughout World War I and the Russian Civil War (including the famine of 1921-1922 that was triggered by Lenin's war communism policies) amounted to a combined total of 18 million, some 10 million in the 1930s, and more than 20 million in 1941-1945. The postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war demographic growth had continued. According to Catherine Merridale, '...reasonable estimate would place the total number of excess deaths for the whole period somewhere around 60 million.'

The birth rate of the USSR decreased from 44.0 per thousand in 1926 to 18.0 in 1974, mainly due to increasing urbanization and the rising average age of marriages. The mortality rate demonstrated a gradual decrease as well - from 23.7 per thousand in 1926 to 8.7 in 1974. In general, the birth rates of the southern republics in Transcaucasia and Central Asia were considerably higher than those in the northern parts of the Soviet Union, and in some cases even increased in the post-World War II period, a phenomenon partly attributed to slower rates of urbanization and traditionally earlier marriages in the southern republics. Soviet Europe moved towards sub-replacement fertility, while Soviet Central Asia continued to exhibit population growth well above replacement-level fertility.

The late 1960s and the 1970s witnessed a reversal of the declining trajectory of the rate of mortality in the USSR, and was especially notable among men of working age, but was also prevalent in Russia and other predominantly Slavic areas of the country. An analysis of the official data from the late 1980s showed that after worsening in the late-1970s and the early 1980s, adult mortality began to improve again. The infant mortality rate increased from 24.7 in 1970 to 27.9 in 1974. Some researchers regarded the rise as mostly real, a consequence of worsening health conditions and services. The rises in both adult and infant mortality were not explained or defended by Soviet officials, and the Soviet government stopped publishing all mortality statistics for ten years. Soviet demographers and health specialists remained silent about the mortality increases until the late-1980s, when the publication of mortality data resumed, and researchers could delve into the real causes.

Women and fertility

Under Lenin, the state made explicit commitments to promote the equality of men and women. Many early Russian feminists and ordinary Russian working women actively participated in the Revolution, and many more were affected by the events of that period and the new policies. Beginning in October 1918, Lenin's government liberalized divorce and abortion laws, decriminalized homosexuality (re-criminalized in 1932), permitted cohabitation, and ushered in a host of reforms. However, without birth control, the new system produced many broken marriages, as well as countless out-of-wedlock children. The epidemic of divorces and extramarital affairs created social hardships when Soviet leaders wanted people to concentrate their efforts on growing the economy. Giving women control over their fertility also led to a precipitous decline in the birth rate, perceived as a threat to their country's military power. By 1936, Stalin reversed most of the liberal laws, ushering in a pronatalist era that lasted for decades.

By 1917, Russia became the first great power to grant women the right to vote. After heavy casualties in World War I and II, women outnumbered men in Russia by a 4:3 ratio. This contributed to the larger role women played in Russian society compared to other great powers at the time.

Anatoly Lunacharsky became the first People's Commissar for Education of Soviet Russia. In the beginning, the Soviet authorities placed great emphasis on the elimination of illiteracy. All left-handed children were forced to write with their right hand in the Soviet school system. Literate people were automatically hired as teachers. For a short period, quality was sacrificed for quantity. By 1940, Stalin could announce that illiteracy had been eliminated. Throughout the 1930s, social mobility rose sharply, which has been attributed to reforms in education. In the aftermath of World War II, the country's educational system expanded dramatically, which had a tremendous effect. In the 1960s, nearly all children had access to education, the only exception being those living in remote areas. Nikita Khrushchev tried to make education more accessible, making it clear to children that education was closely linked to the needs of society. Education also became important in giving rise to the New Man. Citizens directly entering the workforce had the constitutional right to a job and to free vocational training.

The education system was highly centralized and universally accessible to all citizens, with affirmative action for applicants from nations associated with cultural backwardness. However, as part of a general antisemitic policy, an unofficial Jewish quota was applied in the leading institutions of higher education by subjecting Jewish applicants to harsher entrance examinations. The Brezhnev era also introduced a rule that required all university applicants to present a reference from the local Komsomol party secretary. According to statistics from 1986, the number of higher education students per the population of 10,000 was 181 for the USSR, compared to 517 for the US.

Nationalities and ethnic groups

The Soviet Union was an ethnically diverse country, with more than 100 distinct ethnic groups. The total population of the country was estimated at 293 million in 1991. According to a 1990 estimate, the majority of the population were Russians (50.78%), followed by Ukrainians (15.45%) and Uzbeks (5.84%). Overall, in 1989 the ethnic demography of the country showed that 69.8% was East Slavic, 17.5% was Turkic, 1.6% were Armenians, 1.6% were Balts, 1.5% were Finnic, 1.5% were Tajik, 1.4% were Georgian, 1.2% were Moldovan and 4.1% were of other various ethnic groups.

All citizens of the USSR had their own ethnic affiliation. The ethnicity of a person was chosen at the age of sixteen by the child's parents. If the parents did not agree, the child was automatically assigned the ethnicity of the father. Partly due to Soviet policies, some of the smaller minority ethnic groups were considered part of larger ones, such as the Mingrelians of Georgia, who were classified with the linguistically related Georgians. Some ethnic groups voluntarily assimilated, while others were brought in by force. Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, who were all East Slavic and Orthodox, shared close cultural, ethnic, and religious ties, while other groups did not. With multiple nationalities living in the same territory, ethnic antagonisms developed over the years.[neutrality is disputed]

Members of various ethnicities participated in legislative bodies. Organs of power like the Politburo, the Secretariat of the Central Committee etc., were formally ethnically neutral, but in reality, ethnic Russians were overrepresented, although there were also non-Russian leaders in the Soviet leadership, such as Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Podgorny or Andrei Gromyko. During the Soviet era, a significant number of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians migrated to other Soviet republics, and many of them settled there. According to the last census in 1989, the Russian 'diaspora' in the Soviet republics had reached 25 million.

Ethnographic map of the Soviet Union, 1941

Ethnographic map of the Soviet Union, 1970

In 1917, before the revolution, health conditions were significantly behind those of developed countries. As Lenin later noted, "Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice". The Soviet health care system was conceived by the People's Commissariat for Health in 1918. Under the Semashko model, health care was to be controlled by the state and would be provided to its citizens free of charge, a revolutionary concept at the time. Article 42 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution gave all citizens the right to health protection and free access to any health institutions in the USSR. Before Leonid Brezhnev became general secretary, the Soviet healthcare system was held in high esteem by many foreign specialists. This changed, however, from Brezhnev's accession and Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as leader, during which the health care system was heavily criticized for many basic faults, such as the quality of service and the unevenness in its provision. Minister of Health Yevgeniy Chazov, during the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while highlighting such successes as having the most doctors and hospitals in the world, recognized the system's areas for improvement and felt that billions of rubles were squandered.

After the revolution, life expectancy for all age groups went up. This statistic in itself was seen by some that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system. These improvements continued into the 1960s when statistics indicated that the life expectancy briefly surpassed that of the United States. Life expectancy started to decline in the 1970s, possibly because of alcohol abuse. At the same time, infant mortality began to rise. After 1974, the government stopped publishing statistics on the matter. This trend can be partly explained by the number of pregnancies rising drastically in the Asian part of the country where infant mortality was the highest while declining markedly in the more developed European part of the Soviet Union.

Soviet dental technology and dental health were considered notoriously bad. In 1991, the average 35-year-old had 12 to 14 cavities, fillings or missing teeth. Toothpaste was often not available, and toothbrushes did not conform to standards of modern dentistry.

Under Lenin, the government gave small language groups their own writing systems. The development of these writing systems was highly successful, even though some flaws were detected. During the later days of the USSR, countries with the same multilingual situation implemented similar policies. A serious problem when creating these writing systems was that the languages differed dialectally greatly from each other. When a language had been given a writing system and appeared in a notable publication, it would attain 'official language' status. There were many minority languages which never received their own writing system; therefore, their speakers were forced to have a second language. There are examples where the government retreated from this policy, most notably under Stalin where education was discontinued in languages that were not widespread. These languages were then assimilated into another language, mostly Russian. During World War II, some minority languages were banned, and their speakers accused of collaborating with the enemy.

As the most widely spoken of the Soviet Union's many languages, Russian de facto functioned as an official language, as the 'language of interethnic communication' (Russian: язык межнационального общения), but only assumed the status as the official national language in 1990.

Christianity and Islam had the highest number of adherents among the religious citizens. Eastern Christianity predominated among Christians, with Russia's traditional Russian Orthodox Church being the largest Christian denomination. About 90% of the Soviet Union's Muslims were Sunnis, with Shias being concentrated in the Azerbaijan SSR. Smaller groups included Roman Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and a variety of Protestant denominations (especially Baptists and Lutherans).

Religious influence had been strong in the Russian Empire. The Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed a privileged status as the church of the monarchy and took part in carrying out official state functions. The immediate period following the establishment of the Soviet state included a struggle against the Orthodox Church, which the revolutionaries considered an ally of the former ruling classes.

In Soviet law, the 'freedom to hold religious services' was constitutionally guaranteed, although the ruling Communist Party regarded religion as incompatible with the Marxist spirit of scientific materialism. In practice, the Soviet system subscribed to a narrow interpretation of this right, and in fact used a range of official measures to discourage religion and curb the activities of religious groups.

The 1918 Council of People's Commissars decree establishing the Russian SFSR as a secular state also decreed that 'the teaching of religion in all [places] where subjects of general instruction are taught, is forbidden. Citizens may teach and may be taught religion privately.' Among further restrictions, those adopted in 1929 included express prohibitions on a range of church activities, including meetings for organized Bible study. Both Christian and non-Christian establishments were shut down by the thousands in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940, as many as 90% of the churches, synagogues, and mosques that had been operating in 1917 were closed; the majority of them were demolished or re-purposed for state needs with little concern for their historic and cultural value.

More than 85,000 Orthodox priests were shot in 1937 alone. Only a twelfth of the Russian Orthodox Church's priests were left functioning in their parishes by 1941. In the period between 1927 and 1940, the number of Orthodox Churches in Russia fell from 29,584 to less than 500 (1.7%).

The Soviet Union was officially a secular state, but a 'government-sponsored program of forced conversion to atheism' was conducted under the doctrine of state atheism. The government targeted religions based on state interests, and while most organized religions were never outlawed, religious property was confiscated, believers were harassed, and religion was ridiculed while atheism was propagated in schools. In 1925, the government founded the League of Militant Atheists to intensify the propaganda campaign. Accordingly, although personal expressions of religious faith were not explicitly banned, a strong sense of social stigma was imposed on them by the formal structures and mass media, and it was generally considered unacceptable for members of certain professions (teachers, state bureaucrats, soldiers) to be openly religious. While persecution accelerated following Stalin's rise to power, a revival of Orthodoxy was fostered by the government during World War II and the Soviet authorities sought to control the Russian Orthodox Church rather than liquidate it. During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941, only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence before World War I.

Convinced that religious anti-Sovietism had become a thing of the past, and with the looming threat of war, the Stalin regime began shifting to a more moderate religion policy in the late 1930s. Soviet religious establishments overwhelmingly rallied to support the war effort during World War II. Amid other accommodations to religious faith after the German invasion, churches were reopened. Radio Moscow began broadcasting a religious hour, and a historic meeting between Stalin and Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Sergius of Moscow was held in 1943. Stalin had the support of the majority of the religious people in the USSR even through the late 1980s. The general tendency of this period was an increase in religious activity among believers of all faiths.

Under Nikita Khrushchev, the state leadership clashed with the churches in 1958-1964, a period when atheism was emphasized in the educational curriculum, and numerous state publications promoted atheistic views. During this period, the number of churches fell from 20,000 to 10,000 from 1959 to 1965, and the number of synagogues dropped from 500 to 97. The number of working mosques also declined, falling from 1,500 to 500 within a decade.

Religious institutions remained monitored by the Soviet government, but churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques were all given more leeway in the Brezhnev era. Official relations between the Orthodox Church and the government again warmed to the point that the Brezhnev government twice honored Orthodox Patriarch Alexy I with the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. A poll conducted by Soviet authorities in 1982 recorded 20% of the Soviet population as 'active religious believers.'

The legacy of the USSR remains a controversial topic. The socio-economic nature of communist states such as the USSR, especially under Stalin, has also been much debated, varyingly being labelled a form of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism, or a totally unique mode of production. The USSR implemented a broad range of policies over a long period of time, with a large amount of conflicting policies being implemented by different leaders. Some have a positive view of it whilst others are critical towards the country, calling it a repressive oligarchy. The opinions on the USSR are complex and have changed over time, with different generations having different views on the matter as well as on Soviet policies corresponding to separate time periods during its history. Leftists have largely varying views on the USSR. Whilst some leftists, such as anarchists and other libertarian socialists, agree it did not give the workers control over the means of production and was a centralized oligarchy, others have more positive opinions as to the Bolshevik policies and Vladimir Lenin. Many anti-Stalinist leftists such as anarchists are extremely critical of Soviet authoritarianism and repression. Much of the criticism it receives is centered around massacres in the Soviet Union, the centralized hierarchy present in the USSR and mass political repression as well as violence towards government critics and political dissidents such as other leftists. Critics also point towards its failure to implement any substantial worker cooperatives or implementing worker liberation, as well as corruption and the Soviet authoritarian nature.

Western academicians published various analyses of the post-Soviet states' development, claiming that the dissolution was followed by a severe drop in economic and social conditions in these countries, including a rapid increase in poverty, crime, corruption, unemployment, homelessness, rates of disease, infant mortality and domestic violence, as well as demographic losses, alleging that "Neoliberal austerity has created demographic losses exceeding Stalin's deportations back in the 1940s (although without the latter's loss of life", income inequality and the rise of an oligarchical class, along with decreases in calorie intake, life expectancy, adult literacy, and income. Between 1988 and 1989 and 1993-1995, the Gini ratio increased by an average of 9 points for all former Soviet republics. According to Western analysis, the economic shocks that accompanied wholesale privatization were associated with sharp increases in mortality, Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia saw a tripling of unemployment and a 42% increase in male death rates between 1991 and 1994, and in the following decades, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to joining the wealthy capitalist West while most are falling behind, some to such an extent that it will take over fifty years to catch up to where they were before the fall of the Soviet Bloc.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, annual polling by the Levada Center has shown that over 50% of Russia's population regretted this event, with the only exception to this being in the year 2012 when support for the Soviet Union dipped below 50 percent. A 2018 poll showed that 66% of Russians regretted the fall of the Soviet Union, setting a 15-year record, and the majority of these regretting opinions came from people older than 55. In 2020, polls conducted by the Levada Center found that 75% of Russians agreed that the Soviet era was the greatest era in their country's history.

According to the New Russia Barometer (NRB) polls by the Centre for the Study of Public Policy, 50% of Russian respondents reported a positive impression of the Soviet Union in 1991. This increased to about 75% of NRB respondents in 2000, dropping slightly to 71% in 2009. Throughout the 2000s, an average of 32% of NRB respondents supported the restoration of the Soviet Union.

In a 2021 poll, a record 70% of Russians indicated they had a mostly/very favourable view of Joseph Stalin. In Armenia, 12% of respondents said the USSR collapse did good, while 66% said it did harm. In Kyrgyzstan, 16% of respondents said the collapse of the USSR did good, while 61% said it did harm. In a 2018 Rating Sociological Group poll, 47% of Ukrainian respondents had a positive opinion of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, while viewing Lenin, Stalin and Gorbachev very negatively. A 2021 poll conducted by the Levada Center found that 49% of Russians prefer the USSR's political system, while 18% prefer the current political system and 16% would prefer a Western democracy. A further 62% of people polled preferred the Soviet system of central planning, while 24% prefer a market-based system. According to the Levada Center's polls, the primary reasons cited for Soviet nostalgia are the advantages of the shared economic union between the Soviet republics, including perceived financial stability. This was referenced by up to 53% of respondents in 2016. At least 43% also lamented the loss of the Soviet Union's global political superpower status. About 31% cited the loss of social trust and capital. The remainder of the respondents cited a mix of reasons ranging from practical travel difficulties to a sense of national displacement.

The 1941-1945 period of World War II is still known in Russia as the ' Great Patriotic War'. The war became a topic of great importance in cinema, literature, history lessons at school, the mass media, and the arts. As a result of the massive losses suffered by the military and civilians during the conflict, Victory Day celebrated on 9 May is still one of the most important and emotional dates in Russia. Catherine Wanner asserts that Victory Day commemorations are a vehicle for Soviet nostalgia, as they "kept alive a mythology of Soviet grandeur, of solidarity among the Sovietskii narod, and of a sense of self as citizen of a superpower state".

Russian Victory Day parades are organized annually in most cities, with the central military parade taking place in Moscow (just as during the Soviet times). Additionally, the recently-introduced Immortal Regiment on May 9 sees millions of Russians carry the portraits of their relatives who fought in the war. Russia also retains other Soviet holidays, such as the Defender of the Fatherland Day (February 23), International Women's Day (March 8), and International Workers' Day.

In the former Soviet republics

In some post-Soviet republics, there is a more negative view of the USSR, although there is no unanimity on the matter. In large part due to the Holodomor, ethnic Ukrainians have a negative view of the Soviet Union. Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Ukraine's southern and eastern regions have a more positive view of the USSR. In some countries with internal conflict, there is also nostalgia for the USSR, especially for refugees of the post-Soviet conflicts who have been forced to flee their homes and have been displaced. This nostalgia is less an admiration for the country or its policies than it is a longing to return to their homes. The many Russian enclaves in the former USSR republics such as Transnistria have in a general a positive remembrance of it.

By the political left

The left's view of the USSR is complex. While some leftists regard the USSR as an example of state capitalism or that it was an oligarchical state, other leftists admire Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution. Council communists generally view the USSR as failing to create class consciousness, turning into a corrupt state in which the elite controlled society.

Anarchists are also critical of the country, labeling the Soviet system as red fascism. Factors contributing to the anarchist animosity towards the USSR included the Soviet destruction of the Makhnovist movement after an initial alliance, the suppression of the anarchist Kronstadt rebellion, and the defeat of the rival anarchist factions by the Soviet-supported Communist faction during the Spanish Civil War.

Maoists also have a mixed opinion on the USSR, viewing it negatively during the Sino-Soviet Split and denouncing it as revisionist and reverted to capitalism. The Chinese government in 1963 articulated its criticism of the USSR's system and promoted China's ideological line as an alternative.

The culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the USSR's existence. During the first decade following the revolution, there was relative freedom and artists experimented with several different styles to find a distinctive Soviet style of art. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people. On the other hand, hundreds of intellectuals, writers, and artists were exiled or executed, and their work banned, such as Nikolay Gumilyov who was shot for alleged conspiracy against the Bolshevik regime, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.

The government encouraged a variety of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. Communist writers Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this time. As a means of influencing a largely illiterate society, films received encouragement from the state, and much of director Sergei Eisenstein's best work dates from this period.

During Stalin's rule, the Soviet culture was characterized by the rise and domination of the government-imposed style of socialist realism, with all other trends being severely repressed, with rare exceptions, such as Mikhail Bulgakov's works. Many writers were imprisoned and killed.

Following the Khrushchev Thaw, censorship was diminished. During this time, a distinctive period of Soviet culture developed, characterized by conformist public life and an intense focus on personal life. Greater experimentation in art forms was again permissible, resulting in the production of more sophisticated and subtly critical work. The regime loosened its emphasis on socialist realism; thus, for instance, many protagonists of the novels of author Yury Trifonov concerned themselves with problems of daily life rather than with building socialism. Underground dissident literature, known as , developed during this late period. In architecture, the Khrushchev era mostly focused on functional design as opposed to the highly decorated style of Stalin's epoch. In music, in response to the increasing popularity of forms of popular music like jazz in the West, many jazz orchestras were permitted throughout the USSR, notably the Melodiya Ensemble, named after the principle record label in the USSR.

In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and significantly expanded freedom of expression throughout the country in the media and the press.

In summer of 1923 in Moscow was established the Proletarian Sports Society "Dynamo" as a sports organization of Soviet secret police Cheka.

Founded on 20 July 1924 in Moscow, Sovetsky Sport was the first sports newspaper of the Soviet Union.

On 13 July 1925 the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) adopted a statement "About the party's tasks in sphere of physical culture". In the statement was determined the role of physical culture in Soviet society and the party's tasks in political leadership of physical culture movement in the country.

The Soviet Olympic Committee formed on 21 April 1951, and the IOC recognized the new body in its 45th session. In the same year, when the Soviet representative Konstantin Andrianov became an IOC member, the USSR officially joined the Olympic Movement. The 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki thus became first Olympic Games for Soviet athletes. The Soviet Union was the biggest rival to the United States at the Summer Olympics, winning six of its nine appearances at the games and also topping the medal tally at the Winter Olympics six times. The Soviet Union's Olympics success has been attributed to its large investment in sports to demonstrate its superpower image and political influence on a global stage.

The Soviet Union national ice hockey team won nearly every world championship and Olympic tournament between 1954 and 1991 and never failed to medal in any International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) tournament in which they competed.

Soviet Olympic team was notorious for skirting the edge of amateur rules. All Soviet athletes held some nominal jobs, but were in fact state-sponsored and trained full-time. According to many experts, that gave the Soviet Union a huge advantage over the United States and other Western countries, whose athletes were students or real amateurs. Indeed, the Soviet Union monopolized the top place in the medal standings after 1968, and, until its collapse, placed second only once, in the 1984 Winter games, after another Eastern bloc nation, the GDR. Amateur rules were relaxed only in the late 1980s and were almost completely abolished in the 1990s, after the fall of the USSR.

According to British journalist Andrew Jennings, a KGB colonel stated that the agency's officers had posed as anti-doping authorities from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to undermine doping tests and that Soviet athletes were "rescued with [these] tremendous efforts". On the topic of the 1980 Summer Olympics, a 1989 Australian study said "There is hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner, who is not on one sort of drug or another: usually several kinds. The Moscow Games might as well have been called the Chemists' Games."

A member of the IOC Medical Commission, Manfred Donike, privately ran additional tests with a new technique for identifying abnormal levels of testosterone by measuring its ratio to epitestosterone in urine. Twenty percent of the specimens he tested, including those from sixteen gold medalists, would have resulted in disciplinary proceedings had the tests been official. The results of Donike's unofficial tests later convinced the IOC to add his new technique to their testing protocols. The first documented case of ' blood doping' occurred at the 1980 Summer Olympics when a runner was transfused with two pints of blood before winning medals in the 5000 m and 10,000 m.

Documents obtained in 2016 revealed the Soviet Union's plans for a statewide doping system in track and field in preparation for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Dated prior to the country's decision to boycott the Games, the document detailed the existing steroids operations of the program, along with suggestions for further enhancements. The communication, directed to the Soviet Union's head of track and field, was prepared by Dr. Sergei Portugalov of the Institute for Physical Culture. Portugalov was also one of the main figures involved in the implementation of the Russian doping program prior to the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Environment

The Soviet Chernobyl disaster in 1986 was the first major accident at a civilian nuclear power plant. Unparalleled in the world, it resulted in a large number of radioactive isotopes being released into the atmosphere. Radioactive doses have scattered relatively far. 4,000 new cases of thyroid cancer were reported after the incident, but this led to a relatively low number of deaths (WHO data, 2005). However, the long-term effects of the accident are unknown. Another major accident is the Kyshtym disaster.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was discovered that the environmental problems were greater than what the Soviet authorities admitted. The Kola Peninsula was one of the places with clear problems. Around the industrial cities of Monchegorsk and Norilsk, where nickel, for example, is mined, all forests have been destroyed by contamination, while the northern and other parts of Russia have been affected by emissions. During the 1990s, people in the West were also interested in the radioactive hazards of nuclear facilities, decommissioned nuclear submarines, and the processing of nuclear waste or spent nuclear fuel. It was also known in the early 1990s that the USSR had transported radioactive material to the Barents Sea and Kara Sea, which was later confirmed by the Russian parliament. The crash of the K-141 Kursk submarine in 2000 in the west further raised concerns. In the past, there were accidents involving submarines K-19, K-8, a K-129, K-27, K-219 and K-278 Komsomolets.

1. ^ De facto, legally since 1990. Constituent republics had the right to declare their own regional languages.

2. As ^ General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (then the Council of Ministers).

3. ^ Declaration № 142-Н of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, formally establishing the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a state and subject of international law (in Russian).

4. Russian: Советский Союз , (^ tr. Sovetsky Soyuz, IPA: [sɐˈvʲetskʲɪj sɐˈjus] listen ).

5. Russian: Союз Советских Социалистических Республик , (^ tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, IPA: [sɐˈjus sɐˈvʲetskʲɪx sətsɨəlʲɪˈsʲtʲitɕɪskʲɪx rʲɪˈspublʲɪk] listen ).

6. Russian: СССР , ^ tr. SSSR.

7. ^ Ukrainian: рада (rada); Polish: rada; Belarusian: савет/рада; Uzbek: совет; Kazakh: совет / кеңес (Georgian: საბჭოთა (sovet / kenges); Azerbaijani: совет; Lithuanian: taryba; sabch′ota); Romanian: soviet (Moldovan Cyrillic: совиет ); Latvian: padome; Kyrgyz: совет; Tajik: шӯравӣ / совет (Armenian: խորհուրդ / սովետ (Turkmen: совет; Estonian: nõukogu.šūravī / sovet); xorhurd / sovet);

8. The consolidation into a one-party state took place during the first three and a half years after the revolution, which included the period of ^ War communism and an election in which multiple parties competed. See Schapiro, Leonard (1955). The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase 1917-1922. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

9. According to British historian ^ Geoffrey Hosking, "excess deaths during the 1930s as a whole were in the range of 10-11 million."[51] American historian Timothy D. Snyder claims that archival evidence suggests maximum excess mortality of nine million during the entire Stalin era.[52] Australian historian and archival researcher Stephen G. Wheatcroft asserts that around a million "purposive killings" can be attributed to the Stalinist regime, along with the premature deaths of roughly two million more amongst the repressed populations (i.e. in camps, prisons, exiles, etc.) through criminal negligence.

10. "In War II Russia occupies a dominant position and is the decisive factor looking toward the defeat of the Axis in Europe. While in Sicily the forces of Great Britain and the United States are being opposed by 2 German divisions, the Russian front is receiving attention of approximately 200 German divisions. Whenever the Allies open a second front on the Continent, it will be decidedly a secondary front to that of Russia; theirs will continue to be the main effort. Without Russia in the war, the Axis cannot be defeated in Europe, and the position of the United Nations becomes precarious. Similarly, Russia's post-war position in Europe will be a dominant one. With Germany crushed, there is no power in Europe to oppose her tremendous military forces."^ [58]

11. 34,374,483 km^ ².

References

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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ( USSR), was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national republics; in practice, both its government and its economy were highly centralized until its final years.

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Russia ( Russian: Россия, Rossiya, ), or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world by area, extends across eleven time zones, and shares land boundaries with fourteen countries. It is the world's ninth-most populous country and Europe's most populous country. The country's capital and largest city is Moscow. Saint Petersburg is Russia's second-largest city and "cultural capital". Other major urban areas in the country include Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Chelyabinsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Kazan.

The East Slavs emerged as a recognised group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries CE. The first East Slavic state, Kievan Rus', arose in the 9th century, and in 988, it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire. Rus' ultimately disintegrated, with the Grand Duchy of Moscow growing to become the Tsardom of Russia. By the early 18th century, Russia had vastly expanded through conquest, annexation, and the efforts of Russian explorers, developing into the Russian Empire, which remains the third-largest empire in history. However, with the Russian Revolution in 1917, Russia's monarchic rule was abolished and eventually replaced by the Russian SFSR-the world's first constitutionally socialist state. Following the Russian Civil War, the Russian SFSR established the Soviet Union with three other Soviet republics, within which it was the largest and principal constituent. At the expense of millions of lives, the Soviet Union underwent rapid industrialisation in the 1930s and later played a decisive role for the Allies in World War II by leading large-scale efforts on the Eastern Front. With the onset of the Cold War, it competed with the United States for global ideological influence. The Soviet era of the 20th century saw some of the most significant Russian technological achievements, including the first human-made satellite and the first human expedition into outer space.

In 1991, the Russian SFSR emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the independent Russian Federation. A new constitution was adopted, which established a federal semi-presidential system. Since the turn of the century, Russia's political system has been dominated by Vladimir Putin, under whom the country has experienced democratic backsliding and a shift towards authoritarianism. Russia has been militarily involved in a number of conflicts in neighbouring states, which have included the internationally unrecognised annexations of Crimea in 2014 from neighbouring Ukraine, followed by the further annexation of four other regions in 2022 during an ongoing invasion.

Internationally, Russia ranks among the lowest in measurements of democracy, human rights and freedom of the press; the country also has high levels of perceived corruption. The Russian economy ranks 11th by nominal GDP, relying heavily on its abundant natural resources. Its mineral and energy sources are the world's largest, and its figures for oil production and natural gas production rank highly globally. The Russian GDP ranks 68th by per capita; Russia possesses the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and has the third-highest military expenditure. The country is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council; a member state of the G20, SCO, BRICS, APEC, OSCE, and WTO; and the leading member state of post-Soviet organisations such as CIS, CSTO, and EAEU/EEU. Russia is home to 30 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

According to the Primary Chronicle, the word Rus' is derived from the Rus' people, who were a Swedish tribe, and where the three original members of the Rurikid dynastry came from. The Finnish word for Swedes, ruotsi, has the same origin. Later archeological studies mostly confirmed this theory.

The word Russia is a Medieval Latin name for Rus', a medieval state populated primarily by the East Slavs. In modern historiography, this state is usually denoted as after its capital city. Another Medieval Latin name for Rus' was Ruthenia.

In Russian, the current name of the country, ( Rossiya), comes from the Byzantine Greek name for Rus', ( Rosía). A new form of the name , ( Rosiya), was borrowed from the Greek term and first attested in 1387, before coming into official use by the 15th century, though the country was still often referred to by its inhabitants as or the Russian land until the end of the 17th century. There are two words in Russian which translate to "Russians" in English - ( russkiye), which refers to ethnic Russians, and ( rossiyane), which refers to Russian citizens, regardless of ethnicity.

Early history

The first human settlement on Russia dates back to the Oldowan period in the early Lower Paleolithic. About 2 million years ago, representatives of Homo erectus migrated to the Taman Peninsula in southern Russia. Flint tools, some 1.5 million years old, have been discovered in the North Caucasus. Radiocarbon dated specimens from Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains estimate the oldest Denisovan specimen lived 195-122,700 years ago. Fossils of , an archaic human hybrid that was half Neanderthal and half Denisovan, and lived some 90,000 years ago, was also found within the latter cave. Russia was home to some of the last surviving Neanderthals, from about 45,000 years ago, found in Mezmaiskaya cave.

The first trace of an early modern human in Russia dates back to 45,000 years, in Western Siberia. The discovery of high concentration cultural remains of anatomically modern humans, from at least 40,000 years ago, was found at Kostyonki-Borshchyovo, and at Sungir, dating back to 34,600 years ago-both in western Russia. Humans reached Arctic Russia at least 40,000 years ago, in Mamontovaya Kurya. Ancient North Eurasian populations from Siberia genetically similar to Mal'ta-Buret' culture and Afontova Gora were an important genetic contributor to Ancient Native Americans and Eastern Hunter-Gatherers.

Bronze Age spread of Yamnaya Steppe pastoralist ancestry between 3300 and 1500 BC,[42] including the Afanasievo culture of southern Siberia

The Kurgan hypothesis places the Volga-Dnieper region of southern Russia and Ukraine as the urheimat of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Early Indo-European migrations from the Pontic-Caspian steppe of Ukraine and Russia spread Yamnaya ancestry and Indo-European languages across large parts of Eurasia. Nomadic pastoralism developed in the Pontic-Caspian steppe beginning in the Chalcolithic. Remnants of these steppe civilizations were discovered in places such as Ipatovo, Sintashta, Arkaim, and Pazyryk, which bear the earliest known traces of horses in warfare. The genetic makeup of speakers of the Uralic language family in northern Europe was shaped by migration from Siberia that began at least 3,500 years ago.

In the 3rd to 4th centuries CE, the Gothic kingdom of Oium existed in southern Russia, which was later overrun by Huns.[failed verification ] Between the 3rd and 6th centuries CE, the Bosporan Kingdom, which was a Hellenistic polity that succeeded the Greek colonies, was also overwhelmed by nomadic invasions led by warlike tribes such as the Huns and Eurasian Avars. The Khazars, who were of Turkic origin, ruled the steppes between the Caucasus in the south, to the east past the Volga river basin, and west as far as Kyiv on the Dnieper river until the 10th century. After them came the Pechenegs who created a large confederacy, which was subsequently taken over by the Cumans and the Kipchaks.

The ancestors of Russians are among the Slavic tribes that separated from the Proto-Indo-Europeans, who appeared in the northeastern part of Europe c. 1500 years ago. The East Slavs gradually settled western Russia (approximately between modern Moscow and Saint-Petersburg) in two waves: one moving from Kiev towards present-day Suzdal and Murom and another from Polotsk towards Novgorod and Rostov. Prior to Slavic migration, that territory was populated by Finnish-speaking people. From the 7th century onwards, the incoming East Slavs slowly but peacefully assimilated the native Finnic peoples.

The establishment of the first East Slavic states in the 9th century coincided with the arrival of Varangians, the Vikings who ventured along the waterways extending from the eastern Baltic to the Black and Caspian Seas.[failed verification ] According to the Primary Chronicle, a Varangian from the Rus' people, named Rurik, was elected ruler of Novgorod in 862. In 882, his successor Oleg ventured south and conquered Kiev, which had been previously paying tribute to the Khazars. 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.

In the 10th to 11th centuries, Kievan Rus' became one of the largest and most prosperous states in Europe. The reigns of Vladimir the Great (980-1015) and his son Yaroslav the Wise (1019-1054) constitute the Golden Age of Kiev, which saw the acceptance of Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium, and the creation of the first East Slavic written legal code, the Russkaya Pravda. The age of feudalism and decentralisation had come, marked by constant in-fighting between members of the Rurik dynasty that ruled Kievan Rus' collectively. Kiev's dominance waned, to the benefit of Vladimir-Suzdal in the north-east, the Novgorod Republic in the north, and Galicia-Volhynia in the south-west. By the 12th century, Kiev lost its pre-eminence and Kievan Rus' had fragmented into different principalities. Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky sacked Kiev in 1169 and made Vladimir his base, leading to political power being shifted to the north-east.

Led by Prince Alexander Nevsky, Novgorodians repelled the invading Swedes in the Battle of the Neva in 1240, as well as the Germanic crusaders in the Battle on the Ice in 1242.

Kievan Rus' finally fell to the Mongol invasion of 1237-1240, which resulted in the sacking of Kiev and other cities, as well as the death of a major part of the population. The invaders, later known as Tatars, formed the state of the Golden Horde, which ruled over Russia for the next two centuries. Only the Novgorod Republic escaped foreign occupation after it surrendered and agreed to pay tribute to the Mongols. Galicia-Volhynia would later be absorbed by Lithuania and Poland, while the Novgorod Republic continued to prosper in the north. In the northeast, the Byzantine-Slavic traditions of Kievan Rus' were adapted to form the Russian autocratic state.

Grand Duchy of Moscow

Sergius of Radonezh blessing Dmitry Donskoy in Trinity Sergius Lavra, before the Battle of Kulikovo, depicted in a painting by Ernst Lissner

The destruction of Kievan Rus' saw the eventual rise of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, initially a part of Vladimir-Suzdal. While still under the domain of the Mongol- Tatars and with their connivance, Moscow began to assert its influence in the region in the early 14th century, gradually becoming the leading force in the "gathering of the Russian lands". When the seat of the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church moved to Moscow in 1325, its influence increased. Moscow's last rival, the Novgorod Republic, prospered as the chief fur trade centre and the easternmost port of the Hanseatic League.

Led by Prince Dmitry Donskoy of Moscow, the united army of Russian principalities inflicted a milestone defeat on the Mongol-Tatars in the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380. Moscow gradually absorbed its parent duchy and surrounding principalities, including formerly strong rivals such as Tver and Novgorod.

Ivan III ("the Great") threw off the control of the Golden Horde and consolidated the whole of northern Rus' under Moscow's dominion, and was the first Russian ruler to take the title "Grand Duke of all Rus'". After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Moscow claimed succession to the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire. Ivan III married Sophia Palaiologina, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI, and made the Byzantine double-headed eagle his own, and eventually Russia's, coat-of-arms. Vasili III united all of Russia by annexing the last few independent Russian states in the early 16th century.

Tsardom of Russia

In development of the Third Rome ideas, the grand duke Ivan IV ("the Terrible") was officially crowned the first tsar of Russia in 1547. The tsar promulgated a new code of laws ( Sudebnik of 1550), established the first Russian feudal representative body (the Zemsky Sobor), revamped the military, curbed the influence of the clergy, and reorganised local government. During his long reign, Ivan nearly doubled the already large Russian territory by annexing the three Tatar khanates: Kazan and Astrakhan along the Volga, and the Khanate of Sibir in southwestern Siberia. Ultimately, by the end of the 16th century, Russia expanded east of the Ural Mountains. However, the Tsardom was weakened by the long and unsuccessful Livonian War against the coalition of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (later the united Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), the Kingdom of Sweden, and Denmark-Norway for access to the Baltic coast and sea trade. In 1572, an invading army of Crimean Tatars were thoroughly defeated in the crucial Battle of Molodi.

The death of Ivan's sons marked the end of the ancient Rurik dynasty in 1598, and in combination with the disastrous famine of 1601-1603, led to a civil war, the rule of pretenders, and foreign intervention during the Time of Troubles in the early 17th century. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, taking advantage, occupied parts of Russia, extending into the capital Moscow. In 1612, the Poles were forced to retreat by the Russian volunteer corps, led by merchant Kuzma Minin and prince Dmitry Pozharsky. The Romanov dynasty acceded to the throne in 1613 by the decision of the Zemsky Sobor, and the country started its gradual recovery from the crisis.

Russia continued its territorial growth through the 17th century, which was the age of the Cossacks. In 1654, the Ukrainian leader, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, offered to place Ukraine under the protection of the Russian tsar, Alexis; whose acceptance of this offer led to another Russo-Polish War. Ultimately, Ukraine was split along the Dnieper, leaving the eastern part, ( Left-bank Ukraine and Kiev) under Russian rule. In the east, the rapid Russian exploration and colonisation of vast Siberia continued, hunting for valuable furs and ivory. Russian explorers pushed eastward primarily along the Siberian River Routes, and by the mid-17th century, there were Russian settlements in eastern Siberia, on the Chukchi Peninsula, along the Amur River, and on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. In 1648, Semyon Dezhnyov became the first European to navigate through the Bering Strait.

Imperial Russia

Under Peter the Great, Russia was proclaimed an empire in 1721, and established itself as one of the European great powers. Ruling from 1682 to 1725, Peter defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War (1700-1721), securing Russia's access to the sea and sea trade. In 1703, on the Baltic Sea, Peter founded Saint Petersburg as Russia's new capital. Throughout his rule, sweeping reforms were made, which brought significant Western European cultural influences to Russia. He was succeeded by Catherine I (1725-1727), followed by Peter II (1727-1730), and Anna. The reign of Peter I's daughter Elizabeth in 1741-1762 saw Russia's participation in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). During the conflict, Russian troops overran East Prussia, reaching Berlin. However, upon Elizabeth's death, all these conquests were returned to the Kingdom of Prussia by pro-Prussian Peter III of Russia.

Catherine II ("the Great"), who ruled in 1762-1796, presided over the Russian Age of Enlightenment. She extended Russian political control over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and annexed most of its territories into Russia, making it the most populous country in Europe. In the south, after the successful Russo-Turkish Wars against the Ottoman Empire, Catherine advanced Russia's boundary to the Black Sea, by dissolving the Crimean Khanate, and annexing Crimea. As a result of victories over Qajar Iran through the Russo-Persian Wars, by the first half of the 19th century, Russia also conquered the Caucasus. Catherine's successor, her son Paul, was unstable and focused predominantly on domestic issues. Following his short reign, Catherine's strategy was continued with Alexander I's (1801-1825) wresting of Finland from the weakened Sweden in 1809, and of Bessarabia from the Ottomans in 1812. In North America, the Russians became the first Europeans to reach and colonise Alaska. In 1803-1806, the first Russian circumnavigation was made. In 1820, a Russian expedition discovered the continent of Antarctica.

Great power and development of society, sciences and arts

During the Napoleonic Wars, Russia joined alliances with various European powers, and fought against France. The French invasion of Russia at the height of Napoleon's power in 1812 reached Moscow, but eventually failed as the obstinate resistance in combination with the bitterly cold Russian winter led to a disastrous defeat of invaders, in which the pan-European Grande Armée faced utter destruction. Led by Mikhail Kutuzov and Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly, the Imperial Russian Army ousted Napoleon and drove throughout Europe in the War of the Sixth Coalition, ultimately entering Paris. Alexander I controlled Russia's delegation at the Congress of Vienna, which defined the map of post-Napoleonic Europe.

Napoleon's retreat from Moscow by Albrecht Adam (1851)

The officers who pursued Napoleon into Western Europe brought ideas of liberalism back to Russia, and attempted to curtail the tsar's powers during the abortive Decembrist revolt of 1825. At the end of the conservative reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855), a zenith period of Russia's power and influence in Europe, was disrupted by defeat in the Crimean War.

Great liberal reforms and capitalism

Nicholas's successor Alexander II (1855-1881) enacted significant changes throughout the country, including the emancipation reform of 1861. These reforms spurred industrialisation, and modernised the Imperial Russian Army, which liberated much of the Balkans from Ottoman rule in the aftermath of the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War. During most of the 19th and early 20th century, Russia and Britain colluded over Afghanistan and its neighbouring territories in Central and South Asia; the rivalry between the two major European empires came to be known as the Great Game.

The late 19th century saw the rise of various socialist movements in Russia. Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by revolutionary terrorists. The reign of his son Alexander III (1881-1894) was less liberal but more peaceful.

Constitutional monarchy and World War

Under last Russian emperor, Nicholas II (1894-1917), the Revolution of 1905 was triggered by the failure of the humiliating Russo-Japanese War. The uprising was put down, but the government was forced to concede major reforms ( Russian Constitution of 1906), including granting freedoms of speech and assembly, the legalisation of political parties, and the creation of an elected legislative body, the State Duma.

Revolution and civil war

In 1914, Russia entered World War I in response to Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Russia's ally Serbia, and fought across multiple fronts while isolated from its Triple Entente allies. In 1916, the Brusilov Offensive of the Imperial Russian Army almost completely destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Army. However, the already-existing public distrust of the regime was deepened by the rising costs of war, high casualties, and rumors of corruption and treason. All this formed the climate for the Russian Revolution of 1917, carried out in two major acts. In early 1917, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate; he and his family were imprisoned and later executed during the Russian Civil War. The monarchy was replaced by a shaky coalition of political parties that declared itself the Provisional Government, and proclaimed the Russian Republic. On 19 January [ O.S. 6 January], 1918, the Russian Constituent Assembly declared Russia a democratic federal republic (thus ratifying the Provisional Government's decision). The next day the Constituent Assembly was dissolved by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

An alternative socialist establishment co-existed, the Petrograd Soviet, wielding power through the democratically elected councils of workers and peasants, called . The rule of the new authorities only aggravated the crisis in the country instead of resolving it, and eventually, the October Revolution, led by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government and gave full governing power to the soviets, leading to the creation of the world's first socialist state. The Russian Civil War broke out between the anti-communist White movement and the Bolsheviks with its Red Army. In the aftermath of signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that concluded hostilities with the Central Powers of World War I; Bolshevist Russia surrendered most of its western territories, which hosted 34% of its population, 54% of its industries, 32% of its agricultural land, and roughly 90% of its coal mines.

The Allied powers launched an unsuccessful military intervention in support of anti-communist forces. In the meantime, both the Bolsheviks and White movement carried out campaigns of deportations and executions against each other, known respectively as the Red Terror and White Terror. By the end of the violent civil war, Russia's economy and infrastructure were heavily damaged, and as many as 10 million perished during the war, mostly civilians. Millions became White émigrés, and the Russian famine of 1921-1922 claimed up to five million victims.

Soviet Union

Command economy and Soviet society

On 30 December 1922, Lenin and his aides formed the Soviet Union, by joining the Russian SFSR into a single state with the Byelorussian, Transcaucasian, and Ukrainian republics. Eventually internal border changes and annexations during World War II created a union of 15 republics; the largest in size and population being the Russian SFSR, which dominated the union for its entire history politically, culturally, and economically.[failed verification ]

Following Lenin's death in 1924, a troika was designated to take charge. Eventually Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, managed to suppress all opposition factions and consolidate power in his hands to become the country's dictator by the 1930s. Leon Trotsky, the main proponent of world revolution, was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929, and Stalin's idea of Socialism in One Country became the official line. The continued internal struggle in the Bolshevik party culminated in the Great Purge.

Stalinism and violent modernization

Under Stalin's leadership, the government launched a command economy, industrialisation of the largely rural country, and collectivisation of its agriculture. During this period of rapid economic and social change, millions of people were sent to penal labour camps, including many political convicts for their suspected or real opposition to Stalin's rule; and millions were deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union. The transitional disorganisation of the country's agriculture, combined with the harsh state policies and a drought, led to the Soviet famine of 1932-1933; which killed up to 8.7 million, 3.3 million of them in the Russian SFSR. The Soviet Union, ultimately, made the costly transformation from a largely agrarian economy to a major industrial powerhouse within a short span of time.

World War II and United Nations

The Soviet Union entered World War II on 17 September 1939 with its invasion of Poland, in accordance with a secret protocol within the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union later invaded Finland, and occupied and annexed the Baltic states, as well as parts of Romania. On 22 June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, opening the Eastern Front, the largest theater of World War II.

Eventually, some 5 million Red Army troops were captured by the Nazis; the latter deliberately starved to death or otherwise killed 3.3 million Soviet POWs, and a vast number of civilians, as the " Hunger Plan" sought to fulfil Generalplan Ost. Although the Wehrmacht had considerable early success, their attack was halted in the Battle of Moscow. Subsequently, the Germans were dealt major defeats first at the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-1943, and then in the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943. Another German failure was the Siege of Leningrad, in which the city was fully blockaded on land between 1941 and 1944 by German and Finnish forces, and suffered starvation and more than a million deaths, but never surrendered. Soviet forces steamrolled through Eastern and Central Europe in 1944-1945 and captured Berlin in May 1945. In August 1945, the Red Army invaded Manchuria and ousted the Japanese from Northeast Asia, contributing to the Allied victory over Japan.

The 1941-1945 period of World War II is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. The Soviet Union, along with the United States, the United Kingdom and China were considered the Big Four of Allied powers in World War II, and later became the Four Policemen, which was the foundation of the United Nations Security Council. During the war, Soviet civilian and military death were about 26-27 million, accounting for about half of all World War II casualties. The Soviet economy and infrastructure suffered massive devastation, which caused the Soviet famine of 1946-1947. However, at the expense of a large sacrifice, the Soviet Union emerged as a global superpower.

Superpower and Cold War

The "Big Three" at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin

After World War II, parts of Eastern and Central Europe, including East Germany and eastern parts of Austria were occupied by Red Army according to the Potsdam Conference. Dependent communist governments were installed in the Eastern Bloc satellite states. After becoming the world's second nuclear power, the Soviet Union established the Warsaw Pact alliance, and entered into a struggle for global dominance, known as the Cold War, with the rivalling United States and NATO.

Khrushchev Thaw reforms and economic development

After Stalin's death in 1953 and a short period of collective rule, the new leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and launched the policy of de-Stalinization, releasing many political prisoners from the Gulag labour camps. The general easement of repressive policies became known later as the Khrushchev Thaw. At the same time, Cold War tensions reached its peak when the two rivals clashed over the deployment of the United States Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Soviet missiles in Cuba.

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, , thus starting the Space Age. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth, aboard the crewed spacecraft on 12 April 1961.

Period of developed socialism or Era of Stagnation

Following the ousting of Khrushchev in 1964, another period of collective rule ensued, until Leonid Brezhnev became the leader. The era of the 1970s and the early 1980s was later designated as the Era of Stagnation. The 1965 Kosygin reform aimed for partial decentralisation of the Soviet economy. In 1979, after a communist-led revolution in Afghanistan, Soviet forces invaded the country, ultimately starting the Soviet-Afghan War. In May 1988, the Soviets started to withdraw from Afghanistan, due to international opposition, persistent anti-Soviet guerrilla warfare, and a lack of support by Soviet citizens.

Perestroika, democratization and Russian sovereignty

From 1985 onwards, the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who sought to enact liberal reforms in the Soviet system, introduced the policies of (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) in an attempt to end the period of economic stagnation and to democratise the government. This, however, led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements across the country. Prior to 1991, the Soviet economy was the world's second-largest, but during its final years, it went into a crisis.

By 1991, economic and political turmoil began to boil over as the Baltic states chose to secede from the Soviet Union. On 17 March, a referendum was held, in which the vast majority of participating citizens voted in favour of changing the Soviet Union into a renewed federation. In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin became the first directly elected president in Russian history when he was elected president of the Russian SFSR. In August 1991, a coup d'état attempt by members of Gorbachev's government, directed against Gorbachev and aimed at preserving the Soviet Union, instead led to the end of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. On 25 December 1991, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, along with contemporary Russia, fourteen other post-Soviet states emerged.

Independent Russian Federation

Transition to a market economy and political crises

The economic and political collapse of the Soviet Union led Russia into a deep and prolonged depression. During and after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, wide-ranging reforms including privatisation and market and trade liberalisation were undertaken, including radical changes along the lines of " shock therapy". The privatisation largely shifted control of enterprises from state agencies to individuals with inside connections in the government, which led to the rise of the infamous Russian oligarchs. Many of the newly rich moved billions in cash and assets outside of the country in an enormous capital flight. The depression of the economy led to the collapse of social services-the birth rate plummeted while the death rate skyrocketed, and millions plunged into poverty; while extreme corruption, as well as criminal gangs and organised crime rose significantly.

In late 1993, tensions between Yeltsin and the Russian parliament culminated in a constitutional crisis which ended violently through military force. During the crisis, Yeltsin was backed by Western governments, and over 100 people were killed.

Modern liberal constitution, international cooperation and economic stabilization

In December, a referendum was held and approved, which introduced a new constitution, giving the president enormous powers. The 1990s were plagued by armed conflicts in the North Caucasus, both local ethnic skirmishes and separatist Islamist insurrections. From the time Chechen separatists declared independence in the early 1990s, an intermittent guerrilla war was fought between the rebel groups and Russian forces. Terrorist attacks against civilians were carried out by Chechen separatists, claiming the lives of thousands of Russian civilians.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia assumed responsibility for settling the latter's external debts. In 1992, most consumer price controls were eliminated, causing extreme inflation and significantly devaluing the rouble. High budget deficits coupled with increasing capital flight and inability to pay back debts, caused the 1998 Russian financial crisis, which resulted in a further GDP decline.

Movement towards a modernized economy, political centralization and democratic backsliding

On 31 December 1999, president Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned, handing the post to the recently appointed prime minister and his chosen successor, Vladimir Putin. Putin then won the 2000 presidential election, and defeated the Chechen insurgency in the Second Chechen War.

Putin won a second presidential term in 2004. High oil prices and a rise in foreign investment saw the Russian economy and living standards improve significantly. Putin's rule increased stability, while transforming Russia into an authoritarian state. In 2008, Putin took the post of prime minister, while Dmitry Medvedev was elected president for one term, to hold onto power despite legal term limits; this period has been described as a " tandemocracy".

Following a diplomatic crisis with neighbouring Georgia, the Russo-Georgian War took place during 1-12 August 2008, resulting in Russia recognising two separatist states in the territories that it occupies in Georgia. It was the first European war of the 21st century.

Invasion of Ukraine

In early 2014, following a revolution in Ukraine, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea from neighbouring Ukraine following a disputed referendum, with Russian troops later participating in a war in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops. In a major escalation of the conflict, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The invasion marked the largest conventional war in Europe since World War II, and was met with international condemnation, as well as expanded sanctions against Russia. As a result, Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe in March, and was suspended from the United Nations Human Rights Council in April. In September, following successful Ukrainian counteroffensives, Putin announced a " partial mobilisation", Russia's first mobilisation since World War II. By the end of September, Putin proclaimed the annexation of four Ukrainian regions, the largest annexation in Europe since World War II. Putin and Russian-installed leaders signed treaties of accession, internationally unrecognized and widely denounced as illegal, despite the fact that Russian forces have been unable to fully occupy any of the four regions. A number of supranational and national parliaments passed resolutions declaring Russia to be a state sponsor of terrorism. In addition, Russia was declared a terrorist state by Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Hundreds of thousands are estimated to have been killed as a result of the invasion. The war in Ukraine has further exacerbated Russia's demographic crisis.

In June 2023, the Wagner Group, a private military contractor fighting for Russia in Ukraine, declared an open rebellion against the Russian Ministry of Defense, capturing Rostov-on-Don, before beginning a march on Moscow. However, after negotiations between Wagner and the Belarusian government, the rebellion was called off.

Russia's vast landmass stretches over the easternmost part of Europe and the northernmost part of Asia. It spans the northernmost edge of Eurasia; and has the world's fourth-longest coastline, of over 37,653 km (23,396 mi). Russia lies between latitudes 41° and 82° N, and longitudes 19° E and 169° W, extending some 9,000 km (5,600 mi) east to west, and 2,500 to 4,000 km (1,600 to 2,500 mi) north to south. Russia, by landmass, is larger than three continents, and has the same surface area as Pluto.

Russia has nine major mountain ranges, and they are found along the southernmost regions, which share a significant portion of the Caucasus Mountains (containing Mount Elbrus, which at 5,642 m (18,510 ft) is the highest peak in Russia and Europe); the Altai and Sayan Mountains in Siberia; and in the East Siberian Mountains and the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East (containing Klyuchevskaya Sopka, which at 4,750 m (15,584 ft) is the highest active volcano in Eurasia). The Ural Mountains, running north to south through the country's west, are rich in mineral resources, and form the traditional boundary between Europe and Asia. The lowest point in Russia and Europe, is situated at the head of the Caspian Sea, where the Caspian Depression reaches some 29 metres (95.1 ft) below sea level.

Russia, as one of the world's only three countries bordering three oceans, has links with a great number of seas. Its major islands and archipelagos include Novaya Zemlya, Franz Josef Land, Severnaya Zemlya, the New Siberian Islands, Wrangel Island, the Kuril Islands (four of which are disputed with Japan), and Sakhalin. The Diomede Islands, administered by Russia and the United States, are just 3.8 km (2.4 mi) apart; and Kunashir Island of the Kuril Islands is merely 20 km (12.4 mi) from Hokkaido, Japan.

Russia, home of over 100,000 rivers, has one of the world's largest surface water resources, with its lakes containing approximately one-quarter of the world's liquid fresh water. Lake Baikal, the largest and most prominent among Russia's fresh water bodies, is the world's deepest, purest, oldest and most capacious fresh water lake, containing over one-fifth of the world's fresh surface water. Ladoga and Onega in northwestern Russia are two of the largest lakes in Europe. Russia is second only to Brazil by total renewable water resources. The Volga in western Russia, widely regarded as Russia's national river, is the longest river in Europe; and forms the Volga Delta, the largest river delta in the continent. The Siberian rivers of Ob, Yenisey, Lena, and Amur are among the world's longest rivers.

The size of Russia and the remoteness of many of its areas from the sea result in the dominance of the humid continental climate throughout most of the country, except for the tundra and the extreme southwest. Mountain ranges in the south and east obstruct the flow of warm air masses from the Indian and Pacific oceans, while the European Plain spanning its west and north opens it to influence from the Atlantic and Arctic oceans. Most of northwest Russia and Siberia have a subarctic climate, with extremely severe winters in the inner regions of northeast Siberia (mostly Sakha, where the Northern Pole of Cold is located with the record low temperature of −71.2 °C or −96.2 °F), and more moderate winters elsewhere. Russia's vast coastline along the Arctic Ocean and the Russian Arctic islands have a polar climate.

The coastal part of Krasnodar Krai on the Black Sea, most notably Sochi, and some coastal and interior strips of the North Caucasus possess a humid subtropical climate with mild and wet winters. In many regions of East Siberia and the Russian Far East, winter is dry compared to summer; while other parts of the country experience more even precipitation across seasons. Winter precipitation in most parts of the country usually falls as snow. The westernmost parts of Kaliningrad Oblast and some parts in the south of Krasnodar Krai and the North Caucasus have an oceanic climate. The region along the Lower Volga and Caspian Sea coast, as well as some southernmost slivers of Siberia, possess a semi-arid climate.

Throughout much of the territory, there are only two distinct seasons, winter and summer; as spring and autumn are usually brief periods of change between extremely low and extremely high temperatures. The coldest month is January (February on the coastline); the warmest is usually July. Great ranges of temperature are typical. In winter, temperatures get colder both from south to north and from west to east. Summers can be quite hot, even in Siberia. Climate change in Russia is causing more frequent wildfires, and thawing the country's large expanse of permafrost.

Biodiversity

Yugyd Va National Park in the Komi Republic is the largest national park in Europe.[225]

Russia, owing to its gigantic size, has diverse ecosystems, including polar deserts, tundra, forest tundra, taiga, mixed and broadleaf forest, forest steppe, steppe, semi-desert, and subtropics. About half of Russia's territory is forested, and it has the world's largest area of forest, which sequester some of the world's highest amounts of carbon dioxide.

Russian biodiversity includes 12,500 species of vascular plants, 2,200 species of bryophytes, about 3,000 species of lichens, 7,000-9,000 species of algae, and 20,000-25,000 species of fungi. Russian fauna is composed of 320 species of mammals, over 732 species of birds, 75 species of reptiles, about 30 species of amphibians, 343 species of freshwater fish (high endemism), approximately 1,500 species of saltwater fishes, 9 species of cyclostomata, and approximately 100-150,000 invertebrates (high endemism). Approximately 1,100 rare and endangered plant and animal species are included in the Russian Red Data Book.

Russia's entirely natural ecosystems are conserved in nearly 15,000 specially protected natural territories of various statuses, occupying more than 10% of the country's total area. They include 45 biosphere reserves, 64 national parks, and 101 nature reserves. Although in decline, the country still has many ecosystems which are still considered intact forest; mainly in the northern taiga areas, and the subarctic tundra of Siberia. Russia had a Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 9.02 in 2019, ranking 10th out of 172 countries; and the first ranked major nation globally.

Government and politics

A chart of the Russian political system

Russia, by 1993 constitution, is a symmetric federal republic with a semi-presidential system, wherein the president is the head of state, and the prime minister is the head of government. It is structured as a multi-party representative democracy, with the federal government composed of three branches:

Legislative: The bicameral Federal Assembly of Russia, made up of the 450-member State Duma and the 170-member Federation Council, adopts federal law, declares war, approves treaties, has the power of the purse and the power of impeachment of the president.

Executive: The president is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, and appoints the Government of Russia (Cabinet) and other officers, who administer and enforce federal laws and policies. The president may issue decrees of unlimited scope, so long as they do not contradict the constitution or federal law.

Judiciary: The Constitutional Court, Supreme Court and lower federal courts, whose judges are appointed by the Federation Council on the recommendation of the president, interpret laws and can overturn laws they deem unconstitutional.

The president is elected by popular vote for a six-year term and may be elected no more than twice. Ministries of the government are composed of the premier and his deputies, ministers, and selected other individuals; all are appointed by the president on the recommendation of the prime minister (whereas the appointment of the latter requires the consent of the State Duma). United Russia is the dominant political party in Russia, and has been described as " big tent" and the " party of power". Under the administrations of Vladimir Putin, Russia has experienced democratic backsliding, and has become an authoritarian state under a dictatorship, with Putin's policies being referred to as Putinism.

Political divisions

Russia, by 1993 constitution, is a symmetric (with the possibility of an asymmetric configuration) federation. Unlike the Soviet asymmetric model of the RSFSR, where only republics were "subjects of the federation", the current constitution raised the status of other regions to the level of republics and made all regions equal with the title "subject of the federation". The regions of Russia have reserved areas of competence, but no regions have sovereignty, do not have the status of a sovereign state, do not have the right to indicate any sovereignty in their constitutions and do not have the right to secede from the country. The laws of the regions cannot contradict federal laws.

The federal subjects have equal representation-two delegates each-in the Federation Council, the upper house of the Federal Assembly. They do, however, differ in the degree of autonomy they enjoy. The federal districts of Russia were established by Putin in 2000 to facilitate central government control of the federal subjects. Originally seven, currently there are eight federal districts, each headed by an envoy appointed by the president.

Federal subjects

Governance

The most common type of federal subject with a governor and locally elected legislature. Commonly named after their administrative centres.

Each is nominally autonomous-home to a specific ethnic minority, and has its own constitution, language, and legislature, but is represented by the federal government in international affairs.

For all intents and purposes, krais are legally identical to oblasts. The title "krai" ("frontier" or "territory") is historic, related to geographic (frontier) position in a certain period of history. The current krais are not related to frontiers.

Occasionally referred to as "autonomous district", "autonomous area", and "autonomous region", each with a substantial or predominant ethnic minority.

Major cities that function as separate regions (Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as well as Sevastopol in Russian-occupied Ukraine).

The only autonomous oblast is the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.

Foreign relations

Russia had the world's fifth-largest diplomatic network in 2019. It maintains diplomatic relations with 190 United Nations member states, four partially-recognised states, and three United Nations observer states; along with 144 embassies. Russia is one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. It has historically been a great power, and a former superpower as the leading constituent of the former Soviet Union. Russia is a member of the G20, the OSCE, and the APEC. Russia also takes a leading role in organisations such as the CIS, the EAEU, the CSTO, the SCO, and BRICS.

Russia maintains close relations with neighbouring Belarus, which is a part of the Union State, a supranational confederation of the two states. Serbia has been a historically close ally of Russia, as both countries share a strong mutual cultural, ethnic, and religious affinity. India is the largest customer of Russian military equipment, and the two countries share a strong strategic and diplomatic relationship since the Soviet era. Russia wields influence across the geopolitically important South Caucasus and Central Asia; and the two regions have been described as Russia's "backyard".

Russia
Countries on Russia's "Unfriendly Countries List". The list includes countries that have imposed sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

In the 21st century Russia has pursued an aggressive foreign policy aimed at securing regional dominance and international influence, as well as increasing domestic support for the government. Military intervention in the post-soviet states include a war with Georgia in 2008, and the invasion and destabilisation of Ukraine beginning in 2014. Russia has also sought to increase its influence in the Middle East, most significantly through military intervention in the Syrian civil war. Cyberwarfare and airspace violations, along with electoral interference, have been used to increase perceptions of Russian power. Russia's relations with neighbouring Ukraine and the Western world-especially the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and NATO-have collapsed; especially following the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014 and the consequent escalation in 2022. Relations between Russia and China have significantly strengthened bilaterally and economically; due to shared political interests. Turkey and Russia share a complex strategic, energy, and defence relationship. Russia maintains cordial relations with Iran, as it is a strategic and economic ally. Russia has also increasingly pushed to expand its influence across the Arctic, Asia-Pacific, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, two-thirds of the world's population live in countries such as China or India that are neutral or leaning towards Russia.

Sukhoi Su-57, a fifth-generation fighter of the Russian Air Force[296]

The Russian Armed Forces are divided into the Ground Forces, the Navy, and the Aerospace Forces-and there are also two independent arms of service: the Strategic Missile Troops and the Airborne Troops. As of 2021, the military have around a million active-duty personnel, which is the world's fifth-largest, and about 2-20 million reserve personnel. It is mandatory for all male citizens aged 18-27 to be drafted for a year of service in the Armed Forces.

Russia is among the five recognised nuclear-weapons states, with the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons; over half of the world's nuclear weapons are owned by Russia. Russia possesses the second-largest fleet of ballistic missile submarines, and is one of the only three countries operating strategic bombers. Russia maintains the world's third-highest military expenditure, spending $86.4 billion in 2022, corresponding to around 4.1% of its GDP.[302] In 2021 it was the world's second-largest arms exporter, and had a large and entirely indigenous defence industry, producing most of its own military equipment.

Human rights

Violations of human rights in Russia have been increasingly criticised by leading democracy and human rights groups. In particular, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say that Russia is not democratic and allows few political rights and civil liberties to its citizens.

Since 2004, Freedom House has ranked Russia as "not free" in its Freedom in the World survey. Since 2011, the Economist Intelligence Unit has ranked Russia as an "authoritarian regime" in its Democracy Index, ranking it 146th out of 167 countries in 2022. In regards to media freedom, Russia was ranked 155th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders' Press Freedom Index for 2022. The Russian government has been widely criticised by political dissidents and human rights activists for unfair elections, crackdowns on opposition political parties and protests, persecution of non-governmental organisations and enforced suppression and killings of independent journalists, and censorship of mass media and internet.

Muslims, especially Salafis, have faced persecution in Russia. To quash the insurgency in the North Caucasus, Russian authorities have been accused of indiscriminate killings, arrests, forced disappearances, and torture of civilians. In Dagestan, some Salafis along with facing government harassment based on their appearance, have had their homes blown up in counterinsurgency operations. Chechens and Ingush in Russian prisons reportedly take more abuse than other ethnic groups. During the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has set up filtration camps where many Ukrainians are subjected to abuses and forcibly sent to Russia; the camps have been compared to those used in the Chechen Wars.

Russia has introduced several restrictions on LGBT rights, including a 2020 ban on same-sex marriage and the designation of LGBT+ organisations such as the Russian LGBT Network as " foreign agents".

Corruption

Russia's autocratic political system has been variously described as a kleptocracy, an oligarchy, and a plutocracy. It was the lowest rated European country in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index for 2021, ranking 136th out of 180 countries. Russia has a long history of corruption, which is seen as a significant problem. It impacts various sectors, including the economy, business, public administration, law enforcement, healthcare, education, and the military.

Law and crime

The primary and fundamental statement of laws in Russia is the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Statutes, like the Russian Civil Code and the Russian Criminal Code, are the predominant legal sources of Russian law.

Russia has the world's second largest illegal arms trade market, after the United States, is ranked first in Europe and 32nd globally in the Global Organized Crime Index, and is among the countries with the highest number of people in prison.

Russia has a market economy, with enormous natural resources, particularly oil and natural gas. It has the world's ninth-largest economy by nominal GDP and the sixth-largest by PPP. The large service sector accounts for 62% of total GDP, followed by the industrial sector (32%), while the agricultural sector is the smallest, making up only 5% of total GDP. Russia has a low official unemployment rate of 4.1%. Its foreign exchange reserves are the world's fifth-largest, worth $540 billion. It has a labour force of roughly 70 million, which is the world's sixth-largest.

Russia is the world's thirteenth-largest exporter and the 21st-largest importer. It relies heavily on revenues from oil and gas-related taxes and export tariffs, which accounted for 45% of Russia's federal budget revenues in January 2022, and up to 60% of its exports in 2019. Russia has one of the lowest levels of external debt among major economies, although its inequality of household income and wealth is one of the highest among developed countries. High regional disparity is also an issue.

After over a decade of post-Soviet rapid economic growth, backed by high oil-prices and a surge in foreign exchange reserves and investment, Russia's economy was damaged following the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, due to the first wave of Western sanctions being imposed. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the country has faced revamped sanctions and corporate boycotts, becoming the most sanctioned country in the world, in a move described as an "all-out economic and financial war" to isolate the Russian economy from the Western financial system. Due to the impact, the Russian government has stopped publishing a raft of economic data since April 2022. Economists suggest the sanctions will have a long-term effect over the Russian economy.

Transport and energy

Railway transport in Russia is mostly under the control of the state-run Russian Railways. The total length of common-used railway tracks is the world's third-longest, and exceeds 87,000 km (54,100 mi). As of 2016, Russia has the world's fifth-largest road network, with 1.5 million km of roads, while its road density is among the world's lowest. Russia's inland waterways are the world's longest, and total 102,000 km (63,380 mi). Among Russia's 1,218 airports, the busiest is Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow. Russia's largest port is the Port of Novorossiysk in Krasnodar Krai along the Black Sea.

Russia was widely described as an energy superpower. It has the world's largest proven gas reserves, the second-largest coal reserves, the eighth-largest oil reserves, and the largest oil shale reserves in Europe. Russia is also the world's leading natural gas exporter, the second-largest natural gas producer, and the second-largest oil producer and exporter. Russia's oil and gas production led to deep economic relationships with the European Union, China, and former Soviet and Eastern Bloc states. For example, over the last decade, Russia's share of supplies to total European Union (including the United Kingdom) gas demand increased from 25% in 2009 to 32% in the weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In the mid-2000s, the share of the oil and gas sector in GDP was around 20%, and in 2013 it was 20-21% of GDP. The share of oil and gas in Russia's exports (about 50%) and federal budget revenues (about 50%) is large, and the dynamics of Russia's GDP are highly dependent on oil and gas prices, but the share in GDP is much less than 50%. According to the first such comprehensive assessment published by the Russian statistics agency Rosstat in 2021, the maximum total share of the oil and gas sector in Russia's GDP, including extraction, refining, transport, sale of oil and gas, all goods and services used, and all supporting activities, amounts to 19.2% in 2019 and 15.2% in 2020. This is comparable to the share of GDP in Norway and Kazakhstan. It is much lower than the share of GDP in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Russia ratified the Paris Agreement in 2019. Greenhouse gas emissions by Russia are the world's fourth-largest. Russia is the world's fourth-largest electricity producer. It was also the world's first country to develop civilian nuclear power, and to construct the world's first nuclear power plant. Russia was also the world's fourth-largest nuclear energy producer in 2019, and was the fifth-largest hydroelectric producer in 2021.

Agriculture and fishery

Russia's agriculture sector contributes about 5% of the country's total GDP, although the sector employs about one-eighth of the total labour force. It has the world's third-largest cultivated area, at 1,265,267 square kilometres (488,522 sq mi). However, due to the harshness of its environment, about 13.1% of its land is agricultural, and only 7.4% of its land is arable. The country's agricultural land is considered part of the " breadbasket" of Europe. More than one-third of the sown area is devoted to fodder crops, and the remaining farmland is devoted to industrial crops, vegetables, and fruits. The main product of Russian farming has always been grain, which occupies considerably more than half of the cropland. Russia is the world's largest exporter of wheat, the largest producer of barley and buckwheat, among the largest exporters of maize and sunflower oil, and the leading producer of fertilizer.

Various analysts of climate change adaptation foresee large opportunities for Russian agriculture during the rest of the 21st century as arability increases in Siberia, which would lead to both internal and external migration to the region. Owing to its large coastline along three oceans and twelve marginal seas, Russia maintains the world's sixth-largest fishing industry; capturing nearly 5 million tons of fish in 2018. It is home to the world's finest caviar, the beluga; and produces about one-third of all canned fish, and some one-fourth of the world's total fresh and frozen fish.

Science and technology

Russia spent about 1% of its GDP on research and development in 2019, with the world's tenth-highest budget. It also ranked tenth worldwide in the number of scientific publications in 2020, with roughly 1.3 million papers. Since 1904, Nobel Prize were awarded to 26 Soviets and Russians in physics, chemistry, medicine, economy, literature and peace. Russia ranked 51st in the Global Innovation Index in 2023, down from 45th in 2021.

Since the times of Nikolay Lobachevsky, who pioneered the non-Euclidean geometry, and Pafnuty Chebyshev, a prominent tutor; Russian mathematicians became among the world's most influential. Dmitry Mendeleev invented the Periodic table, the main framework of modern chemistry. Nine Soviet and Russian mathematicians have been awarded with the Fields Medal. Grigori Perelman was offered the first ever Clay Millennium Prize Problems Award for his final proof of the Poincaré conjecture in 2002, as well as the Fields Medal in 2006.

Alexander Popov was among the inventors of radio, while Nikolai Basov and Alexander Prokhorov were co-inventors of laser and maser. Oleg Losev made crucial contributions in the field of semiconductor junctions, and discovered light-emitting diodes. Vladimir Vernadsky is considered one of the founders of geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology. Élie Metchnikoff is known for his groundbreaking research in immunology. Ivan Pavlov is known chiefly for his work in classical conditioning. Lev Landau made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics.

Nikolai Vavilov was best known for having identified the centres of origin of cultivated plants. Trofim Lysenko was known mainly for Lysenkoism. Many famous Russian scientists and inventors were émigrés. Igor Sikorsky was an aviation pioneer. Vladimir Zworykin was the inventor of the iconoscope and kinescope television systems. Theodosius Dobzhansky was the central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work in shaping the modern synthesis. George Gamow was one of the foremost advocates of the Big Bang theory.

Space exploration

Roscosmos is Russia's national space agency. The country's achievements in the field of space technology and space exploration can be traced back to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of theoretical astronautics, whose works had inspired leading Soviet rocket engineers, such as Sergey Korolyov, Valentin Glushko, and many others who contributed to the success of the Soviet space program in the early stages of the Space Race and beyond.

In 1957, the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite, , was launched. In 1961, the first human trip into space was successfully made by Yuri Gagarin. Many other Soviet and Russian space exploration records ensued. In 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first and youngest woman in space, having flown a solo mission on Vostok 6. In 1965, Alexei Leonov became the first human to conduct a spacewalk, exiting the space capsule during Voskhod 2.

In 1957, Laika, a Soviet space dog, became the first animal to orbit the Earth, aboard Sputnik 2. In 1966, Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to achieve a survivable landing on a celestial body, the Moon. In 1968, Zond 5 brought the first Earthlings (two tortoises and other life forms) to circumnavigate the Moon. In 1970, Venera 7 became the first spacecraft to land on another planet, Venus. In 1971, Mars 3 became the first spacecraft to land on Mars. During the same period, became the first space exploration rover, while became the world's first space station.

Russia had 172 active satellites in space in April 2022, the world's third-highest. Between the final flight of the Space Shuttle program in 2011 and the 2020 SpaceX's first crewed mission, Soyuz rockets were the only launch vehicles able for transporting astronauts to the ISS. Luna 25 launched in August 2023, is the first of the Luna-Glob Moon exploration programme.

According to the World Tourism Organization, Russia was the sixteenth-most visited country in the world, and the tenth-most visited country in Europe, in 2018, with over 24.6 million visits. According to Federal Agency for Tourism, the number of inbound trips of foreign citizens to Russia amounted to 24.4 million in 2019. Russia's international tourism receipts in 2018 amounted to $11.6 billion. In 2019, travel and tourism accounted for about 4.8% of country's total GDP.

Major tourist routes in Russia include a journey around the Golden Ring of Russia, a theme route of ancient Russian cities, cruises on large rivers such as the Volga, hikes on mountain ranges such as the Caucasus Mountains, and journeys on the famous Trans-Siberian Railway. Russia's most visited and popular landmarks include Red Square, the Peterhof Palace, the Kazan Kremlin, the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius and Lake Baikal.

Moscow, the nation's cosmopolitan capital and historic core, is a bustling megacity. It retains its classical and Soviet-era architecture; while boasting high art, world class ballet, and modern skyscrapers. Saint Petersburg, the Imperial capital, is famous for its classical architecture, cathedrals, museums and theatres, white nights, criss-crossing rivers and numerous canals. Russia is famed worldwide for its rich museums, such as the State Russian, the State Hermitage, and the Tretyakov Gallery; and for theatres such as the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky. The Moscow Kremlin and the Saint Basil's Cathedral are among the cultural landmarks of Russia.

Demographics

Russia is one of the world's most sparsely populated and urbanised countries, with the vast majority of its population concentrated within its western part. It had a population of 142.8 million according to the 2010 census, which rose to 144.7 million as of the 2021 census (excluding Crimea and Sevastopol). Russia is the most populous country in Europe, and the world's ninth most populous country, with a population density of 8 inhabitants per square kilometre (21 inhabitants/sq mi).

Since the 1990s, Russia's death rate has exceeded its birth rate, which some analysts have called a demographic crisis. In 2022, the total fertility rate across Russia was estimated to be 1.42 children born per woman, which is below the replacement rate of 2.1, and is one of the world's lowest fertility rates. Subsequently, the nation has one of the world's oldest populations, with a median age of 40.3 years. In 2009, it recorded annual population growth for the first time in fifteen years, and subsequently experienced annual population growth due to declining death rates, increased birth rates, and increased immigration.

However, since 2020, Russia's population gains have been reversed, as excessive deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in its largest peacetime decline in history. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the demographic crisis in the country has deepened, as the country has reportedly suffered high military fatalities while facing renewed brain drain and human capital flight caused by Western mass-sanctions and boycotts.

Russia is a multinational state with many subnational entities associated with different minorities. There are over 193 ethnic groups nationwide. In the 2010 census, roughly 81% of the population were ethnic Russians, and the remaining 19% of the population were ethnic minorities; while over four-fifths of Russia's population was of European descent-of whom the vast majority were Slavs, with a substantial minority of Finnic and Germanic peoples. According to the United Nations, Russia's immigrant population is the world's third-largest, numbering over 11.6 million; most of which are from post-Soviet states, mainly from Central Asia.

Russian is the official and the predominantly spoken language in Russia. It is the most spoken native language in Europe, the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, as well as the world's most widely spoken Slavic language. Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station, as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Russia is a multilingual nation; approximately 100-150 minority languages are spoken across the country. According to the Russian Census of 2010, 137.5 million across the country spoke Russian, 4.3 million spoke Tatar, and 1.1 million spoke Ukrainian. The constitution gives the country's individual republics the right to establish their own state languages in addition to Russian, as well as guarantee its citizens the right to preserve their native language and to create conditions for its study and development. However, various experts have claimed Russia's linguistic diversity is rapidly declining due to many languages becoming endangered.

Russia is a secular state by constitution, and its largest religion is Eastern Orthodox Christianity, chiefly represented by the Russian Orthodox Church. Orthodox Christianity, together with Islam, Buddhism, and Paganism (either preserved or revived), are recognised by Russian law as the traditional religions of the country, part of its "historical heritage".

Islam is the second-largest religion in Russia, and is the traditional religion among the majority of the peoples of the North Caucasus, and among some Turkic peoples scattered along the Volga-Ural region. Large populations of Buddhists are found in Kalmykia, Buryatia, Zabaykalsky Krai, and they are the vast majority of the population in Tuva. Many Russians practise other religions, including Rodnovery (Slavic Neopaganism), Assianism (Scythian Neopaganism), other ethnic Paganisms, and inter-Pagan movements such as Ringing Cedars' Anastasianism, various movements of Hinduism, Siberian shamanism and Tengrism, various Neo-Theosophical movements such as Roerichism, and other faiths. Some religious minorities have faced oppression and some have been banned in the country; notably, in 2017 the Jehovah's Witnesses were outlawed in Russia, facing persecution ever since, after having been declared an "extremist" and "nontraditional" faith.

In 2012, the research organisation Sreda, in cooperation with the Ministry of Justice, published the Arena Atlas, an adjunct to the 2010 census, enumerating in detail the religious populations and nationalities of Russia, based on a large-sample country-wide survey. The results showed that 47.3% of Russians declared themselves Christians-including 41% Russian Orthodox, 1.5% simply Orthodox or members of non-Russian Orthodox churches, 4.1% unaffiliated Christians, and less than 1% Old Believers, Catholics or Protestants-25% were believers without affiliation to any specific religion, 13% were atheists, 6.5% were Muslims, 1.2% were followers of "traditional religions honouring gods and ancestors" ( Rodnovery, other Paganisms, Siberian shamanism and Tengrism), 0.5% were Buddhists, 0.1% were religious Jews and 0.1% were Hindus.

Moscow State University, the most prestigious educational institution in Russia[488]

Russia has an adult literacy rate of 100%, and has compulsory education for a duration of 11 years, exclusively for children aged 7 to 17-18. It grants free education to its citizens by constitution. The Ministry of Education of Russia is responsible for primary and secondary education, as well as vocational education; while the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia is responsible for science and higher education. Regional authorities regulate education within their jurisdictions within the prevailing framework of federal laws. Russia is among the world's most educated countries, and has the sixth-highest proportion of tertiary-level graduates in terms of percentage of population, at 62.1%. It spent roughly 4.7% of its GDP on education in 2018.

Russia's pre-school education system is highly developed and optional, some four-fifths of children aged 3 to 6 attend day nurseries or kindergartens. Primary school is compulsory for eleven years, starting from age 6 to 7, and leads to a basic general education certificate. An additional two or three years of schooling are required for the secondary-level certificate, and some seven-eighths of Russians continue their education past this level.

Admission to an institute of higher education is selective and highly competitive: first-degree courses usually take five years. The oldest and largest universities in Russia are Moscow State University and Saint Petersburg State University. There are ten highly prestigious federal universities across the country. Russia was the world's fifth-leading destination for international students in 2019, hosting roughly 300 thousand.

Russia, by constitution, guarantees free, universal health care for all Russian citizens, through a compulsory state health insurance program. The Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation oversees the Russian public healthcare system, and the sector employs more than two million people. Federal regions also have their own departments of health that oversee local administration. A separate private health insurance plan is needed to access private healthcare in Russia.

Russia spent 5.65% of its GDP on healthcare in 2019. Its healthcare expenditure is notably lower than other developed nations. Russia has one of the world's most female-biased sex ratios, with 0.859 males to every female, due to its high male mortality rate. In 2021, the overall life expectancy in Russia at birth was 70.06 years (65.51 years for males and 74.51 years for females), and it had a very low infant mortality rate (5 per 1,000 live births).

The principal cause of death in Russia are cardiovascular diseases. Obesity is a prevalent health issue in Russia; most adults are overweight or obese. However, Russia's historically high alcohol consumption rate is the biggest health issue in the country, as it remains one of the world's highest, despite a stark decrease in the last decade. Smoking is another health issue in the country. The country's high suicide rate, although on the decline, remains a significant social issue.

Russian writers and philosophers have played an important role in the development of European literature and thought. The Russians have also greatly influenced classical music, ballet, sport, painting, and cinema. The nation has also made pioneering contributions to science and technology and space exploration.

Russia is home to 30 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, 19 out of which are cultural; while 27 more sites lie on the tentative list. The large global Russian diaspora has also played a major role in spreading Russian culture throughout the world. Russia's national symbol, the double-headed eagle, dates back to the Tsardom period, and is featured in its coat of arms and heraldry. The Russian Bear and Mother Russia are often used as national personifications of the country. Matryoshka dolls are considered a cultural icon of Russia.

Russia has eight-public, patriotic, and religious-official holidays. The year starts with New Year's Day on 1 January, soon followed by Russian Orthodox Christmas on 7 January; the two are the country's most popular holidays. Defender of the Fatherland Day, dedicated to men, is celebrated on 23 February. International Women's Day on 8 March, gained momentum in Russia during the Soviet era. The annual celebration of women has become so popular, especially among Russian men, that Moscow's flower vendors often see profits of "15 times" more than other holidays. Spring and Labour Day, originally a Soviet era holiday dedicated to workers, is celebrated on 1 May.

Victory Day, which honours Soviet victory over Nazi Germany and the End of World War II in Europe, is celebrated on 9 May as an annual large parade in Moscow's Red Square; and marks the famous Immortal Regiment civil event. Other patriotic holidays include Russia Day on 12 June, celebrated to commemorate Russia's declaration of sovereignty from the collapsing Soviet Union; and Unity Day on 4 November, commemorating the 1612 uprising which marked the end of the Polish occupation of Moscow.

There are many popular non-public holidays. Old New Year is celebrated on 14 January. Maslenitsa is an ancient and popular East Slavic folk holiday. Cosmonautics Day on 12 April, in tribute to the first human trip into space. Two major Christian holidays are Easter and Trinity Sunday.

Art and architecture

Early Russian painting is represented in icons and vibrant frescos. In the early 15th-century, the master icon painter Andrei Rublev created some of Russia's most treasured religious art. The Russian Academy of Arts, which was established in 1757, to train Russian artists, brought Western techniques of secular painting to Russia. In the 18th century, academicians Ivan Argunov, Dmitry Levitzky, Vladimir Borovikovsky became influential. The early 19th century saw many prominent paintings by Karl Briullov and Alexander Ivanov, both of whom were known for Romantic historical canvases. Ivan Aivazovsky, another Romantic painter, is considered one of the greatest masters of marine art.

In the 1860s, a group of critical realists ( Peredvizhniki), led by Ivan Kramskoy, Ilya Repin and Vasiliy Perov broke with the academy, and portrayed the many-sided aspects of social life in paintings. The turn of the 20th century saw the rise of symbolism; represented by Mikhail Vrubel and Nicholas Roerich. The Russian avant-garde flourished from approximately 1890 to 1930; and globally influential artists from this era were El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, Wassily Kandinsky, and Marc Chagall.

The history of Russian architecture begins with early woodcraft buildings of ancient Slavs, and the church architecture of Kievan Rus'. Following the Christianization of Kievan Rus', for several centuries it was influenced predominantly by Byzantine architecture. Aristotle Fioravanti and other Italian architects brought Renaissance trends into Russia. The 16th-century saw the development of the unique tent-like churches; and the onion dome design, which is a distinctive feature of Russian architecture. In the 17th-century, the "fiery style" of ornamentation flourished in Moscow and Yaroslavl, gradually paving the way for the Naryshkin baroque of the 1680s.

After the reforms of Peter the Great, Russia's architecture became influenced by Western European styles. The 18th-century taste for Rococo architecture led to the splendid works of Bartolomeo Rastrelli and his followers. The most influential Russian architects of the eighteenth century; Vasily Bazhenov, Matvey Kazakov, and Ivan Starov, created lasting monuments in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and established a base for the more Russian forms that followed. During the reign of Catherine the Great, Saint Petersburg was transformed into an outdoor museum of Neoclassical architecture. Under Alexander I, Empire style became the de facto architectural style. The second half of the 19th-century was dominated by the Neo-Byzantine and Russian Revival style. In early 20th-century, Russian neoclassical revival became a trend. Prevalent styles of the late 20th-century were Art Nouveau, Constructivism, and Socialist Classicism.

Until the 18th-century, music in Russia consisted mainly of church music and folk songs and dances. In the 19th-century, it was defined by the tension between classical composer Mikhail Glinka along with other members of The Mighty Handful, who were later succeeded by the Belyayev circle, and the Russian Musical Society led by composers Anton and Nikolay Rubinstein. The later tradition of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era, was continued into the 20th century by Sergei Rachmaninoff. World-renowned composers of the 20th century include Alexander Scriabin, Alexander Glazunov, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, and later Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Georgy Sviridov, and Alfred Schnittke.

During the Soviet era, popular music also produced a number of renowned figures, such as the two balladeers- Vladimir Vysotsky and Bulat Okudzhava, and performers such as Alla Pugacheva. Jazz, even with sanctions from Soviet authorities, flourished and evolved into one of the country's most popular musical forms. By the 1980s, rock music became popular across Russia, and produced bands such as Aria, Aquarium, DDT, and Kino; the latter's leader Viktor Tsoi, was in particular, a gigantic figure. Pop music has continued to flourish in Russia since the 1960s, with globally famous acts such as t.A.T.u.

Literature and philosophy

Russian literature is considered to be among the world's most influential and developed. It can be traced to the Middle Ages, when epics and chronicles in Old East Slavic were composed. By the Age of Enlightenment, literature had grown in importance, with works from Mikhail Lomonosov, Denis Fonvizin, Gavrila Derzhavin, and Nikolay Karamzin. From the early 1830s, during the Golden Age of Russian Poetry, literature underwent an astounding golden age in poetry, prose and drama. Romanticism permitted a flowering of poetic talent: Vasily Zhukovsky and later his protégé Alexander Pushkin came to the fore. Following Pushkin's footsteps, a new generation of poets were born, including Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet.

The first great Russian novelist was Nikolai Gogol. Then came Ivan Turgenev, who mastered both short stories and novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy soon became internationally renowned. Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote prose satire, while Nikolai Leskov is best remembered for his shorter fiction. In the second half of the century Anton Chekhov excelled in short stories and became a leading dramatist. Other important 19th-century developments included the fabulist Ivan Krylov, non-fiction writers such as the critic Vissarion Belinsky, and playwrights such as Aleksandr Griboyedov and Aleksandr Ostrovsky. The beginning of the 20th century ranks as the Silver Age of Russian Poetry. This era had poets such as Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Konstantin Balmont. It also produced some first-rate novelists and short-story writers, such as Aleksandr Kuprin, Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin, Leonid Andreyev, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Andrei Bely.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Russian literature split into Soviet and white émigré parts. In the 1930s, Socialist realism became the predominant trend in Russia. Its leading figure was Maxim Gorky, who laid the foundations of this style. Mikhail Bulgakov was one of the leading writers of the Soviet era. Nikolay Ostrovsky's novel How the Steel Was Tempered has been among the most successful works of Russian literature. Influential émigré writers include Vladimir Nabokov, and Isaac Asimov; who was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers. Some writers dared to oppose Soviet ideology, such as Nobel Prize-winning novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote about life in the Gulag camps.

Russian philosophy has been greatly influential. Alexander Herzen is known as one of the fathers of agrarian populism. Mikhail Bakunin is referred to as the father of anarchism. Peter Kropotkin was the most important theorist of anarcho-communism. Mikhail Bakhtin's writings have significantly inspired scholars. Helena Blavatsky gained international following as the leading theoretician of Theosophy, and co-founded the Theosophical Society. Vladimir Lenin, a major revolutionary, developed a variant of communism known as Leninism. Leon Trotsky, on the other hand, founded Trotskyism. Alexander Zinoviev was a prominent philosopher in the second half of the 20th century. Aleksandr Dugin, known for his fascist views, has been regarded as the "guru of geopolitics".

Russian cuisine has been formed by climate, cultural and religious traditions, and the vast geography of the nation; and it shares similarities with the cuisines of its neighbouring countries. Crops of rye, wheat, barley, and millet provide the ingredients for various breads, pancakes and cereals, as well as for many drinks. Bread, of many varieties, is very popular across Russia. Flavourful soups and stews include shchi, borsch, ukha, solyanka, and okroshka. Smetana (a heavy sour cream) and mayonnaise are often added to soups and salads. Pirozhki, blini, and syrniki are native types of pancakes. Beef Stroganoff, Chicken Kiev, pelmeni, and shashlyk are popular meat dishes. Other meat dishes include stuffed cabbage rolls ( golubtsy) usually filled with meat. Salads include Olivier salad, vinegret, and dressed herring.

Russia's national non-alcoholic drink is kvass, and the national alcoholic drink is vodka; its production in Russia (and elsewhere) dates back to the 14th century. The country has the world's highest vodka consumption, while beer is the most popular alcoholic beverage. Wine has become increasingly popular in Russia in the 21st century. Tea has been popular in Russia for centuries.

Mass media and cinema

There are 400 news agencies in Russia, among which the largest internationally operating are TASS, RIA Novosti, Sputnik, and Interfax. Television is the most popular medium in Russia. Among the 3,000 licensed radio stations nationwide, notable ones include Radio Rossii, Vesti FM, Echo of Moscow, Radio Mayak, and Russkoye Radio. Of the 16,000 registered newspapers, Argumenty i Fakty, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Izvestia, and Moskovskij Komsomolets are popular. State-run Channel One and Russia-1 are the leading news channels, while RT is the flagship of Russia's international media operations. Russia has the largest video gaming market in Europe, with over 65 million players nationwide.

Russian and later Soviet cinema was a hotbed of invention, resulting in world-renowned films such as The Battleship Potemkin, which was named the greatest film of all time at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958. Soviet-era filmmakers, most notably Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky, would go on to become among of the world's most innovative and influential directors. Eisenstein was a student of Lev Kuleshov, who developed the groundbreaking Soviet montage theory of film editing at the world's first film school, the All-Union Institute of Cinematography. Dziga Vertov's " Kino-Eye" theory had a huge impact on the development of documentary filmmaking and cinema realism. Many Soviet socialist realism films were artistically successful, including , The Cranes Are Flying, and Ballad of a Soldier.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a greater variety of artistic styles in Soviet cinema. The comedies of Eldar Ryazanov and Leonid Gaidai of that time were immensely popular, with many of the catchphrases still in use today. In 1961-68 Sergey Bondarchuk directed an Oscar-winning film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's epic War and Peace, which was the most expensive film made in the Soviet Union. In 1969, Vladimir Motyl's White Sun of the Desert was released, a very popular film in a genre of ostern; the film is traditionally watched by cosmonauts before any trip into space. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian cinema industry suffered large losses-however, since the late 2000s, it has seen growth once again, and continues to expand.

Football is the most popular sport in Russia. The Soviet Union national football team became the first European champions by winning Euro 1960, and reached the finals of Euro 1988. Russian clubs CSKA Moscow and Zenit Saint Petersburg won the UEFA Cup in 2005 and 2008. The Russian national football team reached the semi-finals of Euro 2008. Russia was the host nation for the 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup, and the 2018 FIFA World Cup. However, Russian teams are currently suspended from FIFA and UEFA competitions.

Ice hockey is very popular in Russia, and the Soviet national ice hockey team dominated the sport internationally throughout its existence. Bandy is Russia's national sport, and it has historically been the highest-achieving country in the sport. The Russian national basketball team won the EuroBasket 2007, and the Russian basketball club PBC CSKA Moscow is among the most successful European basketball teams. The annual Formula One Russian Grand Prix was held at the Sochi Autodrom in the Sochi Olympic Park, until its termination following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Historically, Russian athletes have been one of the most successful contenders in the Olympic Games. Russia is the leading nation in rhythmic gymnastics; and Russian synchronised swimming is considered to be the world's best. Figure skating is another popular sport in Russia, especially pair skating and ice dancing. Russia has produced numerous prominent tennis players. Chess is also a widely popular pastime in the nation, with many of the world's top chess players being Russian for decades. The 1980 Summer Olympic Games were held in Moscow, and the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2014 Winter Paralympics were hosted in Sochi. However, Russia has also had 43 Olympic medals stripped from its athletes due to doping violations, which is the most of any country, and nearly a third of the global total.

This article incorporates text from a free content work. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 ( license statement/permission). Text taken from Frequently Asked Questions on Energy Security​, International Energy Agency, the International Energy Agency.

References

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36.0 0.822 · Russia ( Russian: Россия, Rossiya, ), or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world by area, extends across eleven time zones, and shares land boundaries with fourteen countries. It is the world's ninth-most populous country and Europe's most populous country.

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The Russian Revolution was a series of uprisings from 1905 to 1917 led by peasants, laborers and Bolsheviks against the failed rule of the czarist Romanovs.

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Russian Civil War - Army Heritage Center Foundation

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As World War I dragged on, the Russian people grew angry at the Czar and his repressive government. In March…