The history of Russia

Russia is the largest country in the world, stretching across eleven time zones from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Its history as a state begins with the medieval Rus', a realm of East Slavic, Finnic and Baltic peoples ruled by Scandinavian princes from Novgorod and Kyiv, which took Christianity from Byzantium in 988. After two centuries under the Mongols, the princes of Moscow gathered the Russian lands, threw off the Golden Horde and crowned themselves tsars, and under the Romanov dynasty Russia grew into a vast empire that conquered Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia and defeated Napoleon. The revolutions of 1917 brought the Bolsheviks to power and created the Soviet Union, which industrialised at enormous human cost, bore the heaviest losses in the defeat of Nazi Germany and became one of two superpowers of the Cold War. Since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Federation has moved from the turmoil of the 1990s to the long rule of Vladimir Putin, and since 2014, and on a far larger scale since 2022, it has been at war with Ukraine.

Stone tools in the North Caucasus show that early humans reached the territory of modern Russia well over a million years ago. In the Denisova Cave in the Altai, a finger bone revealed a previously unknown archaic human, the Denisovans. Modern humans lived at Kostenki on the Don at least 40,000 years ago, and burials at Sungir, about 34,000 years old, contained thousands of ivory beads.

The southern steppe, which Greek writers later called Scythia, was home to a succession of herding peoples. Around 2000 BCE the Sintashta culture of the southern Urals built some of the earliest known chariots. In the first millennium BCE Iranian-speaking nomads, the Scythians and later the Sarmatians, ruled the steppe, and frozen tombs at Pazyryk in the Altai have preserved tattooed bodies of their nobles. The forests to the north were home to Finno-Ugric peoples, ancestors of the Mari, Mordvins and Komi, while Siberia was inhabited by many peoples, among them Samoyedic reindeer herders, Ugric hunters of the Ob, Tungusic peoples, and later the Turkic Yakuts on the Lena.

After the Huns, Avars and Bulgars, from the seventh to the tenth century the Khazars, a Turkic people whose ruling elite adopted Judaism, dominated the lower Volga and the steppe. On the middle Volga, Volga Bulgaria adopted Islam in the early tenth century and became a prosperous trading state. Meanwhile East Slavic tribes spread northeast from the Dnieper basin into the forests of what is now western Russia, gradually absorbing the Finnic peoples who lived there.

In the ninth century Scandinavian traders and warriors, known as Varangians or Rus', travelled the river routes from the Baltic to the Caspian and the Black Sea during the Viking Age. According to the Primary Chronicle the people of Novgorod invited the Varangian Rurik to rule them in 862, a date long treated as the beginning of Russian statehood. His kinsman Oleg seized Kyiv around 882 and made it the centre of the state known to historians as Kievan Rus'. Prince Sviatoslav destroyed the Khazar khaganate in the 960s, and his son Vladimir, called Volodymyr in Ukrainian, accepted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988. The new faith brought the Cyrillic script, church architecture and Byzantine ideas of rulership.

After Yaroslav's death in 1054, Rus' broke into rival principalities ruled by branches of the Rurikid dynasty. In the northeast, the princes of Vladimir-Suzdal grew powerful; Moscow is first mentioned in 1147, and in 1169 Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky sacked Kyiv. In the northwest, the Novgorod Republic became a merchant city-state whose assembly, the veche, elected and dismissed its princes. Novgorod traded furs and wax with the Hanseatic League, and its birch-bark letters show that many townspeople could write. Which modern nation is the heir of Kievan Rus' remains a politically charged question.

In 1223 a Mongol army defeated the princes of Rus' and their Cuman allies at the Kalka River. In 1237 the forces of the Mongol Empire returned under Batu Khan, destroying Ryazan and Vladimir in 1237 and 1238 and storming Kyiv in 1240. Novgorod was spared, and its prince Alexander Nevsky, while submitting to the Mongols, defeated the Swedes in 1240 and the Livonian knights on frozen Lake Peipus in 1242.

For more than two centuries the Russian principalities were tributaries of the Golden Horde, whose khans ruled from Sarai on the lower Volga. Russian princes needed the khan's patent, the yarlyk, to rule, and paid tribute. Russian historians long called this the "Tatar yoke". The western lands of old Rus', including Kyiv, passed in the fourteenth century to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

The Grand Principality of Moscow rose through service to the khans. Ivan I, nicknamed Kalita, the "moneybag", who ruled from 1325 to 1340, won the right to collect tribute for the Horde from other princes, and the head of the Russian church settled in Moscow. In 1380 Grand Prince Dmitry defeated the Horde's commander Mamai at Kulikovo on the Don, earning the name Donskoy, though the khan Tokhtamysh burned Moscow two years later. As the Horde split into rival khanates, Moscow absorbed its neighbours.

Ivan III, who reigned from 1462 to 1505, annexed Novgorod in 1478 and Tver in 1485, more than tripling the territory of his state. He married Sophia Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and Italian architects rebuilt the Kremlin. In 1480 the Great Stand on the Ugra River ended Moscow's subordination to the Horde. Churchmen began to call Moscow the "Third Rome", heir to Rome and Constantinople.

Ivan the Terrible, grand prince from the age of three, was crowned in 1547 as the first Tsar of All Russia, founding the Tsardom of Russia. In 1552 he conquered the Khanate of Kazan and in 1556 Astrakhan, opening the whole Volga to Russia and bringing large Muslim Tatar populations under its rule. His long Livonian War for the Baltic ended in failure. From 1565 he set up the oprichnina, a state within the state whose black-clad horsemen terrorised the nobility and massacred much of the population of Novgorod in 1570. In 1571 the Crimean Tatars burned Moscow.

In the same years the Cossack leader Yermak crossed the Urals with some 540 men in 1581 and the next year took Qashliq, the capital of the Khanate of Sibir. Over the following decades Cossacks and fur traders advanced along the rivers of Siberia, building forts and forcing native peoples to pay tribute in furs, the yasak. They reached the Pacific at Okhotsk in 1639. Many peoples resisted, and Russian expeditions used violence against the Yakuts in the 1640s and against the Koryaks, Itelmens and Chukchi in the following decades, while smallpox and other diseases killed a large share of some peoples, such as the Yukagirs. The Treaty of Nerchinsk with the Qing dynasty in 1689 fixed Russia's border with China in the Amur region.

The death of Ivan's childless son Feodor I in 1598 ended the old dynasty and opened the Time of Troubles. Boris Godunov was elected tsar, but famine, pretenders claiming to be Ivan's dead son Dmitry, revolts and invasions by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden followed; Polish troops occupied the Kremlin from 1610. In 1612 a popular army led by Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky drove them out, and in 1613 an assembly of the land elected sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov as tsar.

The first Romanovs rebuilt the state. The law code of 1649 bound peasants permanently to their lords' land, completing the establishment of serfdom. In the 1650s Patriarch Nikon's reforms of church ritual caused a schism, as the Old Believers who rejected them were persecuted for centuries. In 1654 Russia took the Cossack Hetmanate of Ukraine under its protection, and in 1667 it gained Kyiv and the lands east of the Dnieper from Poland. In 1670 the Cossack Stepan Razin led a great revolt along the Volga.

Peter the Great, who ruled from 1682 and alone from 1696, set out to make Russia a European great power. After touring Western Europe in 1697 and 1698, he forced his nobles to shave their beards, built a navy, reorganised the army and government, and placed the church under a state-controlled Holy Synod. In the Great Northern War against Sweden, he was defeated at Narva in 1700 but crushed Charles XII at Poltava in 1709. In 1703 he founded Saint Petersburg on land taken from Sweden at the mouth of the Neva, at the cost of thousands of forced labourers' lives, and made it the capital. The Treaty of Nystad in 1721 gave Russia Livonia, Estonia and Ingria, and Peter took the title of emperor, proclaiming the Russian Empire.

After Peter's death a series of palace coups placed empresses on the throne. In 1762 the German-born Catherine the Great overthrew her husband, Peter III, and ruled until 1796. An admirer of the Enlightenment, she nonetheless extended serfdom. The Cossack Yemelyan Pugachev's rebellion of 1773 to 1775 was the largest peasant uprising in Russian history. Wars against the Ottoman Empire brought Russia to the Black Sea, and in 1783 it annexed the Crimean Khanate. With Prussia and Austria, Catherine partitioned Poland out of existence between 1772 and 1795, bringing the lands of present-day Belarus, Lithuania and western Ukraine and a large Jewish population under Russian rule; Jews were largely confined to a Pale of Settlement in the western provinces. Russian traders also settled in Alaska from 1784.

Catherine's grandson Alexander I took Finland from Sweden in 1809 and Bessarabia from the Ottomans in 1812. In June 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia with more than half a million men. After the bloody battle of Borodino in September, the French entered Moscow, which burned, and in the winter retreat that followed the Grande Armée was almost destroyed. Russian troops entered Paris in 1814, and at the Congress of Vienna that ended the Napoleonic Wars Russia gained most of Poland. The war became a national epic, later the setting of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.

In December 1825 liberal army officers, the Decembrists, staged a failed uprising in Saint Petersburg. Nicholas I responded with three decades of strict rule, crushed a Polish uprising in 1830 and 1831, and helped Austria put down the Hungarian revolution in 1849. His reign was also the age of Pushkin and Gogol. In the North Caucasus a long war against the mountain peoples, led in Dagestan and Chechnya by the imam Shamil until 1859, ended in the west with the conquest of Circassia in 1864. Russian forces killed, starved or expelled the great majority of the Circassian people, and hundreds of thousands, by many estimates more than a million, died or fled to the Ottoman Empire. Georgia and Ukraine have recognised these events as genocide; Russia has not. Defeat by Britain, France and the Ottomans in the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 exposed the empire's backwardness.

Alexander II, who came to the throne in 1855, abolished serfdom in 1861, freeing some 23 million privately owned serfs, though they had to pay for their land through redemption payments. He also created elected local councils, reformed the courts and the army, and sold Alaska to the United States in 1867. In the same years Russian armies conquered Central Asia, taking Tashkent in 1865 and Samarkand in 1868, ending the independence of the Kazakh steppe and the khanates of the region, and massacring Turkmen defenders and civilians at Geok Tepe in 1881. Revolutionaries assassinated him in 1881. Alexander III reversed many reforms, and waves of anti-Jewish pogroms followed. Industry grew fast in the 1890s, and the Trans-Siberian Railway, begun in 1891, linked Moscow to the Pacific.

Nicholas II, the last tsar, came to the throne in 1894. Defeat in the war with Japan in 1904 and 1905, and the shooting of peaceful marchers in Saint Petersburg on Bloody Sunday in January 1905, set off the Revolution of 1905, which forced him to grant a parliament, the Duma. Nicholas took Russia into World War I in 1914, and huge defeats, millions of casualties, food shortages and the scandal of the court's dependence on the mystic Grigori Rasputin destroyed the authority of the monarchy.

In February 1917, by the old Russian calendar, strikes and bread riots in Petrograd, as Saint Petersburg had been renamed, spread to the garrison, and Nicholas abdicated, ending three centuries of Romanov rule. A Provisional Government, led from July by Alexander Kerensky, shared power with the soviets, or councils, of workers and soldiers, and kept Russia in the war. Vladimir Lenin, who returned from exile in April, and Leon Trotsky led the Bolsheviks to seize power in Petrograd on 25 October, 7 November in the Western calendar, in the culmination of the Russian Revolution. The new government, inspired by Marxism, dispersed the elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918, moved the capital back to Moscow, and in March 1918 accepted the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, giving up Poland, the Baltic lands and Ukraine and recognising Finland's independence. In July 1918 the former tsar and his family were shot at Yekaterinburg.

The Civil War of 1918 to 1921 pitted the Bolshevik Reds against the Whites, a loose coalition of monarchists, liberals and generals, as well as national movements, peasant armies and Allied interventions. Both sides used terror, and the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, carried out mass executions in the Red Terror. The Reds won and reconquered Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia, but a war with Poland ended in defeat in 1920. War, epidemics and the famine of 1921 and 1922 killed millions. In 1921 Lenin replaced the forced requisitioning of war communism with the New Economic Policy, which allowed small private trade. On 30 December 1922 Soviet Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia formed the Soviet Union.

After Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin outmanoeuvred his rivals and drove Trotsky into exile in 1929, and had him murdered in Mexico in 1940. From 1928 the Five-Year Plans built heavy industry at breakneck pace. The forced collectivisation of agriculture from 1929 destroyed the independent peasantry: millions of peasants labelled kulaks were deported or killed, and the famine of 1932 and 1933 killed millions, mainly in Ukraine, where it is known as the Holodomor, in Kazakhstan and in southern Russia. In Kazakhstan, where the nomadic way of life was destroyed, an estimated 1.3 to 2.3 million people died, close to two-fifths of all Kazakhs.

In the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, show trials of old Bolsheviks were accompanied by mass arrests across society and the army; about 700,000 people were shot. An estimated 18 million people passed through the Gulag, the system of labour camps that stretched across Siberia and the far north. Whole nationalities, such as Koreans of the Far East and later Poles, Germans, Chechens and Crimean Tatars, were deported to Central Asia and Siberia.

In August 1939 Stalin concluded the non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler, with a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe. The Red Army occupied eastern Poland in September, where the NKVD later shot about 20,000 Polish officers and others at Katyn and elsewhere, invaded Finland in the Winter War, and in 1940 annexed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Bessarabia.

On 22 June 1941 Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union. German armies reached the outskirts of Moscow before being driven back in December 1941, and they besieged Leningrad, as Saint Petersburg was then called, for almost 900 days, during which hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants, most often estimated at around a million, died, mainly of starvation. In occupied territory the Germans shot Jews en masse in the Holocaust, starved Soviet prisoners of war by the million and burned thousands of villages. The Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943 and at Kursk in July 1943 turned the tide of World War II in Europe. The Red Army drove west through Eastern Europe and took Berlin in May 1945, and in August it attacked Japanese forces in Manchuria, gaining southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Soviet deaths are estimated at 26 to 27 million, far more than any other country in the war, and the war is still remembered in Russia as the Great Patriotic War.

After 1945 the Soviet Union installed communist governments across Eastern Europe, tested its first atomic bomb in 1949 and became, with the United States, one of two superpowers of the Cold War. Stalin died in March 1953. His successor as party leader, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin's crimes in a secret speech in 1956, released many prisoners from the Gulag and allowed a cultural thaw, but the same year Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising. Sputnik in 1957 and the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, on 12 April 1961 were triumphs of Soviet science. Khrushchev's deployment of nuclear missiles to Cuba led to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and he was removed by his colleagues in 1964.

Under Leonid Brezhnev, from 1964 to 1982, the Soviet Union reached military parity with the United States and crushed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, while dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were exiled or imprisoned. The economy stagnated, and the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 began a costly war that lasted until 1989. After two short-lived successors, Mikhail Gorbachev became party leader in 1985. His policies of perestroika, restructuring, and glasnost, openness, allowed criticism and competitive elections, and he accepted the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in the Revolutions of 1989. But the economy deteriorated, the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 shook confidence in the system, and nationalist movements spread across the republics.

In June 1991 Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian republic. When communist hardliners attempted a coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, Yeltsin led the resistance in Moscow, and the coup collapsed within three days. In December the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus agreed to replace the Soviet Union with a Commonwealth of Independent States, and on 25 December Gorbachev resigned, completing the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Russia inherited the Soviet seat on the UN Security Council and the Soviet nuclear arsenal. In January 1992 the government of Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar freed prices in a programme of "shock therapy", and the rapid privatisation that followed transferred much of the economy to a small group of tycoons, the oligarchs. Hyperinflation wiped out savings and output fell steeply. In October 1993 a standoff with parliament ended when Yeltsin ordered tanks to shell the parliament building, and a new constitution with strong presidential powers was approved in December. A war against Chechnya's independence movement from 1994 to 1996 ended in a humiliating truce after tens of thousands of deaths. Yeltsin narrowly won re-election in 1996, but Russia defaulted on its debts in the financial crisis of 1998.

In August 1999 Yeltsin appointed a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, as prime minister. After apartment-block bombings in Moscow and other cities that the government blamed on Chechen militants, Putin launched the Second Chechen War, and when Yeltsin resigned on 31 December 1999 he became acting president. He won the elections of 2000 and 2004. Rising oil prices brought rapid growth, while Putin brought television under state control, jailed or exiled oligarchs who opposed him and built a centralised system that observers increasingly described as authoritarian. Terrorism linked to the North Caucasus culminated in the Beslan school siege of 2004, in which more than 300 hostages, many of them children, died. In 2008, when term limits obliged Putin to step down, Dmitry Medvedev became president with Putin as prime minister; that August Russia fought a short war with Georgia and recognised the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin's return to the presidency in 2012 was met with the largest protests in Moscow since the 1990s.

In February 2014, after the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine, Russian forces seized Crimea, which Russia annexed in March after a referendum not recognised by most states, and Russia backed separatists in the Donbas, drawing Western sanctions. From 2015 Russia intervened militarily in the civil war in Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad. Constitutional amendments approved in 2020 allowed Putin to run for two further terms. The opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent in August 2020, was imprisoned on his return to Russia in 2021 and died in an Arctic prison colony in February 2024.

On 24 February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which Putin called a "special military operation". Russian forces failed to take Kyiv and withdrew from the north, then captured Mariupol after a destructive siege, while Ukrainian counteroffensives later that year retook much of the Kharkiv region and the city of Kherson. In September 2022 Russia declared the annexation of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, which most countries regard as illegal. Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe, the West imposed sweeping sanctions, and in March 2023 the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin over the deportation of Ukrainian children. At home, protests were met with mass arrests and censorship tightened. In June 2023 the Wagner mercenary group of Yevgeny Prigozhin staged a brief armed mutiny. In August 2024 Ukrainian forces crossed into the Kursk region, and North Korean troops were sent to help Russia drive them out. Putin won a fifth term in March 2024 with an officially reported 88 per cent of the vote, with anti-war candidates barred.

The war, the largest in Europe since 1945, has caused hundreds of thousands of military casualties on both sides. After Donald Trump returned to the US presidency in 2025, renewed negotiations included a US–Russia summit in Alaska in August 2025 and three-way talks in Abu Dhabi and Geneva in early 2026, which produced short ceasefires but no agreement, as Russia demanded the rest of the Donbas and Ukraine refused to cede it. As of October 2026 the fighting continued, with Russian forces occupying about a fifth of Ukraine's internationally recognised territory.