A Brief History of Russia: Forest, Steppe, Empire, and the Long Argument with Itself

Follows: Russia: A Condensed History of Tsars, Revolution, and Empire

On 18–20 September 2026, Russians voted for a new State Duma. According to the final results announced by the head of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova, on 25 September, the ruling United Russia party won 349 of the 450 seats (preliminary figures had given it 355), the largest majority in its history, on a turnout of 59.8 percent. Yabloko, the only party on the original ballot that called for a quick end to the war in Ukraine, had been removed from the national race by the Supreme Court five weeks earlier. The Kremlin's spokesman called the result proof of society's "consolidation" around the head of state. Five Western governments and Ukraine condemned the voting held in occupied Ukrainian territory as illegal.

That one week holds most of the questions this history tries to answer. Why has power in Russia so often gathered in one pair of hands? Why do so many Russians, including many who distrust their government, accept that a strong state is the price of survival? Why does the country's leadership speak of Ukraine as part of its own story, and why do Ukrainians reject that? And what happened to the other Russia, the one of the 1860s reformers, the 1905 Duma, the 1980s glasnost and the 1990s free press, which has always existed beside the autocratic one?

This is a long answer. It tries to tell the story the way a fair-minded Russian historian, a Russian liberal in exile, and a historian from one of Russia's neighbours could each read without feeling cheated, and it says plainly where they disagree.

In this history

1. Forest, steppe and Rus' (to 1240)
2. The Mongol centuries and the rise of Moscow (1237–1533)
3. Ivan the Terrible, the Troubles and the first Romanovs (1533–1689)
4. Peter, Catherine and the making of an empire (1689–1801)
5. 1812, serfdom and the Great Reforms (1801–1881)
6. Revolution (1881–1921)
7. Stalin's revolution from above (1921–1941)
8. The Great Patriotic War (1941–1945)
9. Superpower: Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev (1945–1991)
10. The 1990s: freedom and freefall (1991–1999)
11. Putin's Russia (1999–2021)
12. The full-scale war and Russia in 2026 (2022–2026)
13. How to understand Russia today

Part 1 — Forest, steppe and Rus' (to 1240)

A country shaped by its plain

Russia today covers about one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land, spread across eleven time zones. Most of its people, though, live in the western part, on the great East European Plain: a flat, wide land of forest in the north, mixed woodland in the middle, and open grassland (the steppe) in the south. There are few mountains to block an invader and few natural borders to stop expansion. Rivers, not roads, were the highways: the Volga flowing south to the Caspian, the Dnieper to the Black Sea, the Western Dvina and the Neva toward the Baltic.

Two facts about this landscape run through all of Russian history. First, the forest zone had poor soils and a short growing season, so farming families produced little surplus, and the state that later grew up there had to squeeze hard to feed armies. Second, the steppe to the south was a corridor for horse-riding nomads (Scythians, then Huns, Avars, Khazars, Pechenegs, Polovtsians and finally Mongols) who could raid deep into the forest. Many Russian historians have drawn from this a lesson about the need for a strong, centralised state that can defend an open frontier. Others reply that geography explains pressures, not choices, and that other open-plain peoples built different kinds of states.

Who lived here

By the second half of the first millennium AD, East Slavic tribes had spread across the forest and forest-steppe, living alongside Finno-Ugric peoples in the north and east (ancestors of today's Mari, Mordvins and others) and Baltic peoples in the west. To the south-east, the Khazar khanate, whose ruling elite adopted Judaism, controlled much of the steppe trade. The Slavs farmed, hunted, kept bees, and traded furs, honey, wax and slaves along the rivers.

Rurik and the Varangians

The oldest East Slavic chronicle, the Tale of Bygone Years (often called the Primary Chronicle), was written down by monks in Kyiv in the early twelfth century. It says that around 860 the quarrelling tribes of the north invited a Scandinavian prince, Rurik, to come and rule them, and that he settled at Novgorod. Around 880 his successor Oleg took Kyiv on the Dnieper and made it the centre of a loose federation of towns and tribes that came to be called Rus'.

Who the "Rus'" were has been argued about for 250 years. The "Normanist" view holds that they were Scandinavian traders and warriors (Varangians, or Vikings) who founded the state and were soon absorbed into the Slavic majority. "Anti-Normanists", especially in Russian and Soviet scholarship, played down the Scandinavian role and stressed native Slavic state-building. Most historians today accept a Scandinavian ruling elite that quickly became Slavic in language and culture, ruling over a mainly Slavic population.

Kyiv, Byzantium and 988

Kyivan Rus' grew rich by sitting on the trade route "from the Varangians to the Greeks", from the Baltic down the Dnieper to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Princess Olga, regent in the mid-tenth century, became a Christian. Her grandson Volodymyr (Vladimir in Russian) went further: in 988 he accepted Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium and had the people of Kyiv baptised. That choice tied Rus' to the Greek Christian world rather than to Latin Rome, gave it an alphabet (Cyrillic, created for Slavs a century earlier) and a church language, and set it on a cultural path distinct from Poland or Hungary. Under Yaroslav the Wise (who ruled Kyiv from 1019 to 1054) the city built its Cathedral of St Sophia, a law code was compiled, and Yaroslav's daughters married into the royal houses of France, Norway and Hungary.

After Yaroslav, Rus' broke into rival principalities ruled by his descendants. Novgorod in the north became a merchant republic with an elected assembly. In the north-east, the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal grew strong; a small fort there called Moscow is first mentioned in a chronicle in 1147. In the south-west, Galicia–Volhynia became a rich kingdom in its own right.

One origin, two readings

Here the first great historical argument begins, and it is not only academic.

Most historians outside both countries describe Kyivan Rus' as the common medieval ancestor of three modern nations (Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian), none of which existed in its modern form in the year 1000. Medieval people thought of themselves as subjects of a prince and members of a church, not as citizens of a nation. Reading modern borders back into the eleventh century is something nationalists on every side have done; it is not something the evidence supports.

A note on names: English writers traditionally used Russian spellings (Kiev, Kievan Rus'). Since Ukraine's independence, and especially since 2022, most English-language institutions use the Ukrainian forms (Kyiv, Kyivan Rus'). This history follows that usage, with the Russian forms given where they matter.

Part 2 — The Mongol centuries and the rise of Moscow (1237–1533)

The invasion

In 1223 a Mongol scouting army crushed the princes of Rus' and their Polovtsian allies on the Kalka River, then vanished. It returned in 1237 under Batu, a grandson of Genghis Khan. Over the next three years the Mongols destroyed Ryazan, Vladimir and dozens of other towns, and in 1240 they sacked Kyiv. Novgorod, protected by marshes and by paying tribute, was spared. In the same years its prince, Alexander Nevsky, defeated a Swedish force on the Neva (1240) and the German crusading knights of the Livonian Order on frozen Lake Peipus (1242); he is still one of Russia's national heroes.

The Mongols did not occupy the forest lands. They ruled from the Golden Horde, their state on the lower Volga, and demanded tribute, soldiers and obedience. Russian princes had to travel to the Horde (and sometimes all the way to Mongolia) to receive a yarlyk, a patent to rule. The church was left alone and exempted from taxes, and it grew rich and influential.

What the "Mongol yoke" did

Russian writers since the nineteenth century have called this period the "Tatar-Mongol yoke" and blamed it for cutting Russia off from Europe during the Renaissance. Historians have long debated how deep its effect was. Some argue that Muscovy borrowed Mongol methods (census-taking, a postal relay system, tribute collection and an absolute ruler) and that Russian autocracy has Mongol roots. Others argue the Byzantine church and the needs of a frontier state mattered more. A twentieth-century school called the Eurasianists went further and celebrated the Mongol inheritance as proof that Russia is neither European nor Asian but a civilisation of its own. That idea has had a revival in Russian politics since the 1990s.

Moscow gathers the lands

Moscow's rise was not inevitable. It was a minor town, but its princes were clever and lucky. In the 1320s Prince Ivan I, nicknamed Kalita ("Moneybag"), won the Horde's trust and the right to collect tribute from other princes, which made him rich. The head of the Russian church moved to Moscow in the same decade, giving the city spiritual prestige. In 1380 Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy defeated a Horde army at Kulikovo Field on the Don. It was not the end of Mongol rule (a Horde army burned Moscow two years later) but it showed the Horde could be beaten.

Two heirs of Rus'

Moscow was not the only power gathering the old lands of Rus'. To the west, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded through the fourteenth century over most of today's Belarus and Ukraine, including Kyiv, and in 1385 entered a dynastic union with Poland. Its chancery wrote in a Ruthenian (East Slavic) language and most of its subjects were Orthodox. For two centuries there were thus two rival states claiming the Rus' inheritance: a Catholic-led, increasingly Polish-influenced commonwealth in the west, where the ancestors of Ukrainians and Belarusians lived, and Orthodox Muscovy in the north-east. This split, more than any medieval ethnic difference, is why Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian identities developed apart.

Life under the Horde

For ordinary people these centuries meant tribute, raids, and the forest. Most lived in small villages of log houses, growing rye, oats and flax on cleared land, and moving on when the soil was exhausted. Monasteries pushed into the northern wilderness and became centres of farming, learning and pilgrimage; the Trinity monastery founded by St Sergius of Radonezh north of Moscow became the spiritual heart of Muscovy. In the early fifteenth century the monk Andrei Rublev painted icons, including his Trinity, that are still counted among the greatest works of Russian art. In Novgorod, archaeologists have dug up more than a thousand letters scratched on birch bark from these centuries: shopping lists, love notes, debt reminders and a boy's school exercises, proof that literacy reached well beyond the clergy.

Ivan III and the Third Rome

Ivan III, who ruled from 1462 to 1505, is the real founder of the Muscovite state. He annexed Novgorod in 1478, deporting its leading families and carrying off the bell that summoned its assembly. He married Sophia Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, adopted the double-headed eagle, and began to call himself "tsar" (from "caesar") in dealings with smaller powers. In 1480 a Horde army and Ivan's army faced each other across the Ugra River and both withdrew without battle; Russian history dates the end of the "yoke" from that stand-off.

After Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, a Russian monk wrote to Ivan's son Vasily III that Moscow was now the "Third Rome": the first Rome had fallen into heresy, the second (Constantinople) to the infidel, and Moscow alone remained as the centre of true Christianity. "Two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and a fourth there shall not be." The idea was a monk's, not a state doctrine, but it resonated through later Russian thinking about the country's special mission.

Part 3 — Ivan the Terrible, the Troubles and the first Romanovs (1533–1689)

The first tsar

Ivan IV came to the throne at the age of three, grew up amid the feuds of the great noble families (the boyars), and in 1547 was crowned as the first formal "tsar of all Rus'". His early reign brought reforms: a new law code, a standing infantry (the streltsy), and the first assemblies of the land. Then came conquest. In 1552 Ivan took Kazan, the capital of a Tatar khanate on the middle Volga, and in 1556 Astrakhan, where the Volga meets the Caspian. Muscovy now controlled the whole length of the river and, for the first time, ruled large Muslim and Turkic populations. St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square was built to celebrate Kazan.

In 1581 the Stroganov merchant family, who wanted furs, hired a Cossack leader named Yermak to lead an expedition across the Urals. He defeated the khanate of Sibir, and within seventy years Russian traders, soldiers and trappers had crossed Siberia to the Pacific. The Indigenous peoples of Siberia were made to pay a fur tribute (yasak), and many were devastated by violence and disease. The Treaty of Nerchinsk with China in 1689 fixed a border in the Far East.

The oprichnina

Ivan's long Livonian War (1558–83) for access to the Baltic ended in defeat. At home, after the death of his first wife, he turned on his own elite. In 1565 he split the country, taking a large part of it as his personal domain, the oprichnina, policed by black-clad horsemen, the oprichniki. They killed boyars, merchants and peasants, confiscated land, and in 1570 massacred the people of Novgorod. In 1572 Ivan abandoned the policy. Trade fell, peasants fled the violence and taxes, and the state began restricting their right to move. According to contemporary accounts he also struck and killed his own eldest son in a rage in 1581. Russians call him Grozny, usually translated "the Terrible" but closer to "the Fearsome" or "the Formidable", and they argue about him still: a builder of state and empire, or a tyrant whose terror wrecked his country? Under Stalin, Ivan was praised in films and textbooks as a model ruler; in recent years statues of him have gone up in several Russian cities.

The Time of Troubles

Ivan's surviving son Fedor was the last of the Rurik line. When he died in 1598 the regent Boris Godunov became tsar, and the country fell into the Smuta, the Time of Troubles. A famine in 1601–03 killed vast numbers. Pretenders claiming to be Ivan's dead son Dmitry raised armies; Polish and Swedish troops intervened; Polish forces occupied Moscow from 1610 to 1612. The country was rescued not by a prince but by a coalition: a butcher from Nizhny Novgorod, Kuzma Minin, and a prince, Dmitry Pozharsky, raised a volunteer army that drove the Poles out of the Kremlin in 1612. In 1613 an assembly of the land elected sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov as tsar. His family would rule until 1917. Since 2005, 4 November, the date associated with the liberation of Moscow, has been a national holiday, Unity Day.

The Troubles left a lesson that Russian rulers have repeated ever since: when the centre weakens, the country falls apart and foreigners walk in. Russian liberals reply that the Troubles were ended by citizens acting together, and that an elected assembly chose the new dynasty.

Serfdom becomes law

The early Romanovs rebuilt the state on the backs of the peasants. The Law Code of 1649 bound peasants permanently to the land and to their lords: they could no longer leave, and runaways could be hunted down without time limit. Serfdom in Russia was not a medieval leftover, as in much of western Europe, but a new institution of the seventeenth century, created to guarantee the gentry who served in the tsar's army a workforce. It would last until 1861.

Revolts followed. The Don Cossack Stepan (Stenka) Razin led a huge rebellion along the Volga in 1670–71 before being captured and executed in Moscow. The church split too: Patriarch Nikon's reforms to bring Russian ritual into line with Greek practice (making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two, for example) were rejected by millions of "Old Believers", who were persecuted, and some of whom burned themselves alive rather than submit. A church council condemned them in 1666–67.

The Cossack Hetmanate joins Muscovy

In 1648 the Cossacks of the Dnieper, under Bohdan Khmelnytsky, rose against Polish rule (the uprising and its massacres of Jews and Poles are told in A Brief History of Ukraine in this series). In 1654 at Pereiaslav, Khmelnytsky's Cossacks took an oath to the tsar. Russian imperial and Soviet histories called this the "reunion" of Ukraine with Russia; many Ukrainian historians read it as a military alliance or protectorate that Moscow later turned into annexation. The Treaty of Andrusovo with Poland in 1667 left Muscovy with Kyiv and the lands east of the Dnieper.

Part 4 — Peter, Catherine and the making of an empire (1689–1801)

Peter the Great

Peter I took power in 1689 (his half-brother Ivan V remained co-tsar until 1696), a giant of a man (over two metres tall) with endless energy and a fascination with ships, guns and Western technology. In 1697–98 he travelled incognito through the Dutch Republic and England, working in shipyards. When he returned he ordered his nobles to shave their beards and wear Western clothes, and he set about remaking the state.

His central project was war with Sweden, then the dominant power of the Baltic. In the Great Northern War (1700–21) he lost badly at Narva in 1700, rebuilt his army, and in 1709 destroyed the army of Charles XII of Sweden at Poltava, in Ukraine, where Charles had marched after campaigning through Poland. The Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa, who had switched to the Swedish side, fled with Charles. The Treaty of Nystad in 1721 gave Russia the Baltic coast from Vyborg to Riga, and Peter took the title of emperor: Muscovy became the Russian Empire.

In 1703, on marshland newly taken from Sweden at the mouth of the Neva, Peter founded St Petersburg, and in 1713 made it the capital. Tens of thousands of conscripted peasants and prisoners built it, at great cost in lives. It was meant to be a "window on Europe", and for two centuries it was the seat of Russian power.

Peter's methods were brutal. He had his own son Alexei tortured and condemned for opposing him; Alexei died in prison in 1718. His reforms made the nobility more European and the peasantry more enslaved. Ever since, Russians have argued whether Peter showed that their country belongs in Europe (the view of the nineteenth-century "Westernisers") or that he broke a native Russian path (the view of the "Slavophiles").

What the empire cost its people

For most Russians the eighteenth century meant heavier burdens. The poll tax fell on every male peasant; recruits were taken from villages for what was effectively life service, and villages held farewell laments for them as if for the dead. Serfs could be bought and sold, sometimes separately from their families, and lords could have them flogged or exiled to Siberia. At the same time a small, French-speaking nobility built palaces and estates, and a Westernised high culture took root: Moscow University was founded in 1755, and the scientist and poet Mikhail Lomonosov, a fisherman's son from the White Sea coast, became Russia's first great scholar.

The age of empresses

For most of the eighteenth century Russia was ruled by women: Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth and, from 1762, Catherine II, a German princess who came to power in a coup against her husband Peter III, who was killed soon after. Catherine the Great corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, wrote a long "Instruction" for a law-code commission drawing on Montesquieu, and collected the art that became the Hermitage. Her Charter to the Nobility of 1785 freed nobles from compulsory service and confirmed their privileges. For serfs it was the opposite: their condition worsened, and Catherine gave away hundreds of thousands of state peasants to favourites.

In 1773 a Don Cossack, Yemelyan Pugachev, announced that he was the murdered Peter III and raised the largest peasant war in Russian history, joined by Cossacks, Bashkirs and other Turkic peoples, Ural factory workers and serfs. It was crushed in 1774 and Pugachev was executed in Moscow. The poet Alexander Pushkin later wrote of the "senseless and merciless" Russian revolt.

Expansion

Catherine's armies took the north coast of the Black Sea from the Ottoman Empire and in 1783 annexed the Crimean Khanate, home of the Crimean Tatars. Under Prince Grigory Potemkin new towns such as Kherson and Sevastopol were founded in the territory called "New Russia", followed in 1794 by Odesa. In the three partitions of Poland–Lithuania (1772, 1793 and 1795), Russia, Prussia and Austria divided a state that had once ruled Moscow; Russia took most of today's Belarus, Lithuania and right-bank Ukraine. With those lands came most of the world's Jews. In the 1790s Catherine's government confined Jewish residence to the western provinces, the Pale of Settlement, which lasted until 1917.

By 1800 the Russian Empire stretched from the Baltic to Alaska. It was already multinational: by the census of 1897, fewer than half of its subjects were Russians. Whether to call this growth "expansion", "the gathering of lands", "colonisation" or "conquest" depends heavily on whose history is being told. To Russian imperial historians it was a civilising mission into empty or lawless lands; to Poles, Crimean Tatars, Kazakhs, Circassians and many others, it was conquest.

Part 5 — 1812, serfdom and the Great Reforms (1801–1881)

Napoleon and 1812

Alexander I, who came to the throne in 1801 after a palace plot killed his father Paul, at first allied with and then fought against Napoleon. In June 1812 Napoleon invaded with the largest army Europe had seen. The Russians retreated, fought a bloody draw at Borodino in September, and abandoned Moscow, which was occupied and burned. With no peace offer from the tsar and winter coming, Napoleon retreated; cold, hunger, disease and Cossack and partisan raids destroyed most of his army. In 1814 Russian troops entered Paris.

1812 became the founding myth of Russian patriotism, the "Patriotic War", told in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (published in the 1860s) and in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. When the Soviet Union fought Germany after 1941 it called that struggle the "Great Patriotic War" to make the echo unmistakable.

Decembrists and the iron tsar

Young officers who had seen Europe came home with ideas. When Alexander died in December 1825, a group of them refused to swear allegiance to his brother Nicholas and demanded a constitution. The "Decembrist" revolt was put down within a day; five leaders were hanged and over a hundred exiled to Siberia, where some of their wives followed them. They became martyrs for later generations of Russian liberals and revolutionaries.

Nicholas I (1825–55) ruled through censorship and a political police, the Third Section, under the official motto "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality". He crushed a Polish uprising in 1830–31 and helped Austria crush the Hungarian revolution in 1849. Yet his reign was also the golden age of Russian literature: Pushkin (killed in a duel in 1837), Lermontov and Gogol wrote under his censors, and the great debate between Westernisers and Slavophiles began in the salons of Moscow.

Conquering the Caucasus

From 1801, when it annexed eastern Georgia, Russia fought for decades to subdue the North Caucasus. The Avar imam Shamil led Chechen and Dagestani resistance until his surrender in 1859. In the north-west Caucasus, the campaign that ended in 1864 killed or drove out most of the Circassian people, hundreds of thousands of whom were expelled to the Ottoman Empire; Circassian organisations and a number of historians call this a genocide; the Russian government rejects the term. In the same decades Russia conquered Central Asia: Tashkent fell in 1865, and Bukhara and Khiva became protectorates.

Defeat in Crimea and the Great Reforms

The Crimean War of 1853–56, in which Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia defeated Russia on its own soil at Sevastopol, exposed how far serf Russia had fallen behind industrial Europe. Nicholas died during the war. His son Alexander II concluded that the old order could not survive. "It is better to abolish serfdom from above," he told Moscow nobles, "than to wait until it begins to abolish itself from below."

On 19 February 1861 (old calendar; 3 March in the modern one) he signed the emancipation of about 20 million privately owned serfs, two years before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Former serfs became legally free, but the land deal was harsh: they received less land than they had farmed, had to pay for it through decades of "redemption payments", and the land usually went not to individuals but to the village commune, the mir, which redistributed strips and was collectively responsible for taxes.

The village after freedom

Emancipation changed less in the village than the reformers had hoped. Former serfs had to make redemption payments to the state for almost fifty years; the commune still decided who farmed which strip, and peasants needed its permission to leave for the city. Population grew fast, holdings shrank, and land hunger became the great grievance of the peasantry until 1917. But the reforms opened other doors: zemstvo schools and clinics spread into the countryside, staffed by teachers, doctors and agronomists who formed a new, idealistic professional class. Railways linked the grain lands of the south to the Black Sea ports, and Russia became one of the world's great wheat exporters.

This was also the age of Russia's greatest literature and music. Ivan Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy wrote novels that asked what a person owes to God, to the peasant, and to their own conscience; the composers of the "Mighty Handful" (Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and others) built a national school on folk melodies, while Tchaikovsky wrote symphonies and ballets that the whole world came to know.

The revolutionaries

The reforms did not satisfy everyone. In 1874 thousands of students "went to the people" to educate and rouse the peasants, who often handed them to the police. Some radicals turned to terror. On 1 March 1881 members of the group People's Will killed Alexander II with a bomb in St Petersburg, on the day he had approved a plan for a limited consultative assembly. His son Alexander III reversed course: tighter censorship, more police power, Russification of non-Russian peoples, and new restrictions on Jews after a wave of pogroms swept the south-west of the empire in 1881–82.

Part 6 — Revolution (1881–1921)

An empire racing to industrialise

Under Finance Minister Sergei Witte in the 1890s, the state borrowed from France, built the Trans-Siberian Railway, and pushed industry hard. Factories in St Petersburg, Moscow, the Urals and the Donbas filled with peasant workers living in crowded barracks. Yet most Russians still lived in villages, where a famine in 1891–92 killed around half a million. Radical parties formed: the Marxist Social Democrats (who split in 1903 into Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks and the more moderate Mensheviks), the peasant-oriented Socialist Revolutionaries, and the liberal Constitutional Democrats ("Kadets").

Culture flourished in the last decades of the empire: Anton Chekhov's plays The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard caught a gentry world in decline; the "Silver Age" poets and the painters of the avant-garde, from Kandinsky to Malevich, made Russia a centre of modern art. Russian Jews, confined to the Pale and subject to quotas in universities, emigrated in their hundreds of thousands, many to the United States, while others joined the socialist parties or the Jewish Labour Bund, founded in 1897.

1905

War with Japan (1904–05) went disastrously; the Baltic fleet sailed round the world to be sunk at Tsushima. On Sunday 9 January 1905 a priest, Georgy Gapon, led a peaceful march of workers carrying icons and a petition to the Winter Palace. Troops fired, killing several hundred. "Bloody Sunday" set off a year of strikes, mutinies (including on the battleship Potemkin) and peasant risings. In October Nicholas II issued a manifesto promising civil liberties and an elected parliament, the Duma, which first met in 1906.

The tsar never accepted that he was a constitutional monarch. He dissolved the first two Dumas and rigged the electoral law. His prime minister Pyotr Stolypin combined harsh repression (the hangman's noose was nicknamed "Stolypin's necktie") with a serious land reform that let peasants leave the commune and own private farms. Stolypin was assassinated in 1911.

War and the fall of the monarchy

In 1914 Russia went to war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Millions of men were mobilised; the army suffered huge losses; inflation and food shortages hit the cities. Nicholas took personal command at the front, leaving government to the empress Alexandra, who was under the influence of the faith healer Grigory Rasputin until aristocrats murdered him in December 1916.

In February 1917 (March in the Western calendar), bread queues and strikes in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed) turned into revolution when soldiers refused to fire on the crowds. Nicholas abdicated. Power was split between a Provisional Government of liberals and moderate socialists and the Petrograd Soviet (council) of workers' and soldiers' deputies.

The Provisional Government kept fighting the war and postponed land reform until a Constituent Assembly could meet. Lenin, returned from Swiss exile with German help, promised "peace, land and bread" and "all power to the soviets". On 25 October 1917 (7 November) the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd. Elections for the Constituent Assembly, held soon afterward, gave the Socialist Revolutionaries the largest share; when the Assembly met in January 1918 the Bolsheviks dispersed it after a single day.

Was October a popular revolution or a coup? Soviet history called it the Great October Socialist Revolution, the will of the working class. Most Western and many Russian historians see a seizure of power by a disciplined minority party, carried by real popular anger at the war and the landlords. Both can be true at once.

Civil war

In March 1918 the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, giving up Poland, the Baltic lands, Finland and Ukraine. They moved the capital to Moscow. In July 1918, in Yekaterinburg, they shot Nicholas II, his wife, their five children and their servants.

The civil war of 1918–21 pitted the Bolshevik Reds against a mixed array of Whites (monarchist and nationalist officers), with British, French, American and Japanese intervention forces at the edges, peasant "Green" armies, anarchists in Ukraine, and national movements in Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia that tried to form their own states. Both sides used terror; the Bolsheviks' political police, the Cheka, took hostages and shot "class enemies" in large numbers. Jewish communities in Ukraine and Belarus suffered massacres at the hands of several armies. Under "War Communism" the Bolsheviks seized grain from peasants by force.

The Reds won, because they held the central industrial heartland and railways, because they were united and the Whites were not, and because many peasants feared the return of the landlords more than they hated the Bolsheviks. A war with Poland ended in 1921 with the Treaty of Riga. But the country was ruined. In March 1921 the sailors of Kronstadt, once heroes of the revolution, rebelled demanding free soviets; Trotsky's Red Army crushed them. The same year a famine broke out in the Volga region. Lenin retreated to the New Economic Policy (NEP), allowing peasants to sell their surplus and small private trade to resume. In December 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed, a federation of Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian republic.

Part 7 — Stalin's revolution from above (1921–1941)

Lenin's heir

Lenin suffered a series of strokes and died in January 1924. His last notes warned against Joseph Stalin, a Georgian Bolshevik who as the party's general secretary controlled appointments. Stalin outmanoeuvred his rivals one by one: Leon Trotsky (expelled in 1929, murdered in Mexico by a Soviet agent in 1940), then Zinoviev and Kamenev, then Bukharin.

The Soviet Union of the 1920s was a strange mix: a one-party dictatorship with a free-ish peasant economy, a burst of avant-garde art and film (Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin came out in 1925), a campaign against religion, and a policy of korenizatsiya ("rooting") that promoted local languages and cadres in the non-Russian republics.

Collectivisation and famine

In 1928–29 Stalin ended NEP. The first Five-Year Plan set wild targets for heavy industry, and the countryside was forced into collective farms (kolkhozy). Peasants labelled kulaks, supposedly rich farmers, but in practice anyone who resisted, were shot, sent to camps or deported. In 1930–31 alone about 1.8 million people were deported as "kulaks" to Siberia, the Urals and Kazakhstan, according to the historian Nicolas Werth. Peasants slaughtered their animals rather than hand them over.

Grain was taken from the villages to feed the cities and sell abroad. In 1932–33 famine struck the main grain regions: Ukraine, the North Caucasus (including the Kuban, with its large Ukrainian population), the Volga and Kazakhstan.

The famine in Ukraine, which Ukrainians call the Holodomor ("death by hunger"), was made worse by measures aimed specifically at Ukraine and the Kuban: villages were blacklisted, and in January 1933 a directive barred starving peasants from leaving Ukraine and the North Caucasus to look for food. Whether it was a genocide is debated. Ukraine's parliament declared it one in 2006, and many other parliaments have since agreed; historians such as Davies and Wheatcroft argue that Stalin's policies killed millions through brutal priorities rather than an intent to destroy Ukrainians as such. The Russian government recognises the famine as a tragedy shared by many Soviet peoples and rejects the genocide label. The debate is told in full in A Brief History of Ukraine in this series.

The Great Terror

In 1934 the Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov was murdered, probably with Stalin's knowledge, though this has never been proved; the killing became the pretext for purges. In three Moscow show trials (1936–38), old Bolsheviks confessed to absurd charges of spying and sabotage. The Red Army's officer corps was decimated. But most victims were ordinary people caught up in "mass operations" with quotas for each region.

According to Werth's account, drawn from the opened Soviet archives, between August 1937 and November 1938 more than 1.5 million people were arrested by the NKVD (the political police) and about 800,000 were executed. Under NKVD Order No. 00447, aimed at former kulaks, criminals and "anti-Soviet elements", about 767,000 people were sentenced, of whom about 387,000 were shot. The "national operations" targeted diaspora peoples: the Polish operation alone took some 111,000 lives.

The Gulag, the network of labour camps and colonies, held about 1.9 million prisoners in 1941 and peaked at about 2.5 million in the early 1950s, according to figures summarised by the economist Paul Gregory. Prisoners dug canals, felled forests and mined gold in the Arctic. Millions more lived in "special settlements" of deportees. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago (published abroad in 1973) and Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales are the great literary testimonies.

How many people did Stalin's regime kill? There is no single number. Executions, famine deaths, deaths in camps and in deportation are counted differently by different scholars, and the totals depend on what is included. The documented executions of 1937–38 alone were around 800,000.

Building, and believing

The same years saw real change. Industrial output soared, new cities like Magnitogorsk rose from the steppe, literacy spread, millions of peasants moved into cities and education, and women entered factories and universities. Many Soviet citizens believed sincerely that they were building socialism, even as neighbours vanished at night. That double memory, of genuine achievement and of terror, is the root of Russia's still-divided view of Stalin.

The pact

In August 1939 Stalin's foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Hitler's Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a non-aggression pact with a secret protocol dividing eastern Europe. Germany invaded Poland from the west on 1 September; the Red Army invaded from the east on 17 September. The USSR then annexed eastern Poland (today's western Ukraine and western Belarus), attacked Finland in the Winter War of 1939–40, and in 1940 annexed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and part of Romania (today's Moldova). In April and May 1940 the NKVD shot about 25,700 Polish officers, officials, police and others at Katyn forest and other sites, according to the Soviet documents published by Russian archivists in 1997. The Soviet Union blamed the Germans until 1990, when Gorbachev's government admitted the truth.

Part 8 — The Great Patriotic War (1941–1945)

Barbarossa

On 22 June 1941 Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union with about three million soldiers. Stalin had ignored repeated warnings. In the first months the Red Army lost millions of men killed or captured; German forces reached the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow. The Nazis' plans for the East included starving tens of millions of Slavs and replacing them with German settlers. Of some 5.7 million Soviet soldiers captured by the Germans, about 3.3 million (57 percent) were dead by the end of the war, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, many from deliberate starvation. Behind the front, German killing units and their local collaborators murdered Soviet Jews by shooting, village by village.

Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad

The Red Army halted the Germans before Moscow in December 1941. Leningrad was besieged for about 870 days, from September 1941 to January 1944; hundreds of thousands of its civilians died, most from starvation in the first winter. At Stalingrad on the Volga, after months of street fighting, Soviet forces encircled the German Sixth Army; it surrendered in early 1943, and some 91,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner. At Kursk in July 1943 the Red Army won the largest tank battle of the war, and from then on it advanced west. In April–May 1945 it took Berlin; Germany surrendered on 8 May, and Russia celebrates Victory Day on 9 May, because it was already the next day in Moscow.

Factories were evacuated east of the Urals in the first months of the war and kept producing tanks and aircraft; American Lend-Lease supplied trucks, food, aluminium and much else.

A people's war

The war was fought by the whole society. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet women served in the armed forces, as nurses and signallers but also as snipers, tank drivers and the night-bomber pilots the Germans called "night witches". Partisan bands operated behind German lines in Belarus and Ukraine. In the rear, women, teenagers and pensioners worked twelve-hour shifts in the factories that had been moved east of the Urals in 1941, while Lend-Lease supplies from the United States and Britain (trucks, food, boots, aluminium) helped keep the army moving. Discipline was savage: in July 1942 Stalin's Order No. 227, "Not a step back!", set up blocking detachments behind the front and penal battalions for those who retreated.

The Holocaust also took place on Soviet soil. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, at least 1.5 million and possibly more than 2 million Jews were murdered in mass shootings and gas vans on Soviet territory, most of them near their own homes in 1941–42, as at Babyn Yar outside Kyiv, where about 34,000 were shot in two days. Soviet official memory long folded them into the general category of "peaceful Soviet citizens", and the specifically Jewish character of the killing was rarely acknowledged until the late 1980s.

The cost

No country lost more people in the Second World War.

These figures cover the whole USSR, not only Russia: Ukraine and Belarus, which were fully occupied, lost a larger share of their populations than Russia did.

War within the war

Stalin's regime did not pause its repression. In 1943–44 whole peoples accused of collaboration were deported to Central Asia and Siberia: Karachays, Kalmyks, Balkars, Meskhetian Turks, the Volga Germans (already in 1941), and in February 1944 about 521,000 Chechens and Ingush, and in May 1944 about 180,000 Crimean Tatars, according to NKVD figures cited by Werth. Many died in transit and in the first years of exile. Returning Soviet prisoners of war were screened, and many sent to the Gulag. In the Baltic states and western Ukraine, armed nationalist resistance to the returning Soviet power lasted into the early 1950s.

In Russia today the Great Patriotic War is the closest thing to a sacred national story: almost every family lost someone, and the "Immortal Regiment" marches, where people carry portraits of relatives who fought, drew millions. Historians in Poland and the Baltic states add that for them 1944–45 brought not only liberation from Nazism but a new occupation, and that the war began for them in 1939, when the USSR was Hitler's partner.

Part 9 — Superpower: Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev (1945–1991)

Victory and a new empire

The war left the Soviet Army in the heart of Europe. In the following years communist regimes were installed across eastern Europe. The wartime alliance with the United States and Britain gave way to the Cold War. The USSR tested an atomic bomb in 1949 and a hydrogen bomb in 1953. At home a famine in 1946–47 killed many more, and in Stalin's last years a campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" targeted Jews, culminating in the fabricated "Doctors' Plot" of 1953. Stalin died in March 1953.

Khrushchev's thaw

Nikita Khrushchev emerged as leader. In February 1956, in a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress, he gave his "secret speech" denouncing Stalin's cult of personality and some of his crimes. Millions of Gulag prisoners were released and "rehabilitated". The same year Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian revolution.

These were the years of Soviet triumph in space: Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in 1957, and Yuri Gagarin, the first human in orbit, in 1961. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novella about a Gulag prisoner, was published in a Soviet journal in 1962. But in the same year troops fired on striking workers in Novocherkassk, and the Cuban missile crisis brought the world close to nuclear war. Khrushchev's colleagues removed him in October 1964, and he was allowed to retire, itself a sign of change: no fallen Soviet leader before him had died in his bed.

The Brezhnev years

Under Leonid Brezhnev (1964–82) the Soviet Union reached military parity with the United States and settled into stability. For many older Russians the 1970s are remembered fondly: secure jobs, cheap flats, holidays in Crimea, no war at home. Oil exports after 1973 paid for grain imports. But growth slowed, shortages were constant, corruption spread, and alcohol consumption and male mortality rose. In 1968 Warsaw Pact forces crushed the "Prague Spring" reforms in Czechoslovakia. Dissidents such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov and the writer Solzhenitsyn (expelled in 1974) were persecuted; some were held in psychiatric hospitals. In December 1979 Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, beginning a decade-long war that killed about 15,000 Soviet soldiers and a far larger number of Afghans.

Everyday Soviet life

From the late 1950s millions of families moved out of crowded communal apartments, where several families shared a kitchen and bathroom, into the five-storey prefabricated blocks nicknamed khrushchevki. Education and health care were free, rents were tiny, and unemployment officially did not exist. But almost everything was in short supply: people queued for sausage, waited years for a car or a flat, and relied on blat, the network of favours and connections, to get anything done. A favourite joke ran: "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." Television, the dacha (a country cottage with a vegetable plot), summer pioneer camps and the bard songs of Vladimir Vysotsky and Bulat Okudzhava were the textures of late Soviet life.

Gorbachev

After two elderly successors (Andropov and Chernenko) died in quick succession, Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary in March 1985. At 54 he was young by Politburo standards. He wanted to save socialism by reforming it: perestroika (restructuring) of the economy, glasnost (openness) in public life, and "new thinking" in foreign policy.

The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine on 26 April 1986 (Chornobyl in Ukrainian), and the government's initial silence, convinced Gorbachev that secrecy was strangling the country. Glasnost took off: Stalin's crimes were debated openly, banned books were published, and the Memorial society began documenting the victims of repression. Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987; Soviet troops left Afghanistan by February 1989. When eastern Europeans overthrew their communist governments in 1989, Gorbachev did not send in the tanks. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.

Perestroika failed economically: half-reforms broke the old planned system without creating markets, and shortages grew worse. Meanwhile national movements in the Baltics, the Caucasus, Ukraine and elsewhere demanded sovereignty, and in some places ethnic violence broke out. In August 1991 hardliners placed Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea and declared a state of emergency. Crowds in Moscow defended the Russian parliament, troops refused to fire, and the coup collapsed in three days. It destroyed what authority the Soviet centre had left.

The end is remembered in two ways. For many in the West, in the Baltics and among Russian liberals, it was a liberation, and peaceful. In 2005 Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union "a major geopolitical disaster of the century", and many Russians who lived through the 1990s would agree with him.

Part 10 — The 1990s: freedom and freefall (1991–1999)

Shock

Boris Yeltsin's government freed most prices in January 1992. Consumer prices rose by roughly 875 percent in 1993 alone, by the World Bank's measure, after even steeper rises in 1992. Savings were wiped out. Between 1991 and 1998 Russia's economic output fell by about 43 percent, a collapse deeper than America's Great Depression. Workers went months without pay; pensioners sold their possessions on the streets. Male life expectancy fell to about 57 in 1994.

Privatisation, first through vouchers handed to every citizen and then, in 1995, through the "loans-for-shares" auctions in which a few well-connected bankers acquired oil, nickel and other giant companies cheaply in exchange for loans to the government, created a class of billionaires known as the oligarchs. To liberals, the reforms were the painful but necessary price of escaping a dead system; to their critics, including many former supporters, it was theft dressed as reform.

Tanks against parliament

Yeltsin clashed with the Supreme Soviet, the parliament elected in Soviet times. In September 1993 he dissolved it, unconstitutionally; deputies barricaded themselves inside the parliament building, and after armed supporters tried to storm the Moscow television centre, Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the building in early October. Many people were killed in the street fighting. A new constitution, approved by referendum in December 1993, gave the presidency sweeping powers that later presidents would use.

Chechnya

In December 1994 Russian forces invaded Chechnya, which had declared independence. The war was a catastrophe: Grozny was flattened, and Chechen fighters retook it in 1996. Estimates of the dead in the first war vary widely, from about 35,000 to about 120,000, mostly civilians, according to a survey of estimates by the demographic journal Demoscope Weekly. A ceasefire in 1996 left Chechnya de facto independent and lawless.

Surviving the decade

Ordinary Russians improvised. By the mid-1990s an estimated five to ten million "shuttle traders" were travelling to China, Turkey and the Emirates with empty bags and coming home with clothes and electronics to sell at open-air markets. Families lived on what they grew at the dacha. Scientists, engineers and doctors emigrated or drove taxis. Crime and contract killings flourished, and private security firms became a major industry. Russia also became federal in practice: regions such as Tatarstan negotiated power-sharing treaties with Moscow (Tatarstan's came in 1994), and governors built local fiefdoms.

The death rate soared, especially among working-age men, driven by alcohol, heart disease, violence and stress; the population began to shrink in 1992 and has done so in most years since. Churches, mosques and synagogues reopened, and the Orthodox Church, persecuted for most of the Soviet period, became one of the most trusted institutions in the country.

Free and fragile

The 1990s were also years of real freedom: a raucous independent press, the NTV television channel that showed the horrors of Chechnya, open elections, religious revival, open borders and new businesses. Yeltsin, ill and drinking, won re-election in 1996 against the Communist Gennady Zyuganov with heavy oligarch backing and favourable media coverage. In August 1998 Russia defaulted on its debt and the rouble collapsed; the economy shrank by about 5 percent that year. On 31 December 1999 Yeltsin resigned and handed power to his prime minister, a former KGB officer and head of the FSB security service, Vladimir Putin.

Russia and the West in the 1990s

Yeltsin's Russia wanted to be part of the West. It joined the International Monetary Fund in 1992, received Western loans, and in 1997 took part in the G-8 summit in Denver as a full member for the first time. American advisers helped design the privatisation programme, which later made "Western advice" a dirty phrase for many Russians. Two issues soured the relationship. The first was NATO's decision to take in former Warsaw Pact countries (Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined in 1999), which almost the whole Russian political class opposed and which the central European states, remembering 1956, 1968 and 1939, had demanded. The second was NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo in March–June 1999, without UN Security Council approval, which Russians across the spectrum saw as proof that the West would use force against a Slavic, Orthodox state whenever it chose.

For many Russians the word for the 1990s is likhiye, "wild" or "dashing" in a dangerous sense. Putin's government has made that memory central to its legitimacy: whatever else, it says, there will be no return to the chaos. Russian liberals answer that the chaos was the price of the Soviet collapse, not of freedom itself, and that the 1990s planted every free institution that has since been dismantled.

Part 11 — Putin's Russia (1999–2021)

The rise

In September 1999 huge bombs destroyed four apartment blocks in Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk, killing nearly 300 people. The government blamed Chechen terrorists and launched a second Chechen war; Putin, prime minister since August, promised to pursue terrorists everywhere and became wildly popular. A suspicious incident in Ryazan, where FSB officers were caught planting what locals thought was a bomb (the FSB said it was a training exercise with sugar), fuelled claims that the security services were behind the bombings. Those claims, made most fully by the former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko and the historian Yuri Felshtinsky in their book Blowing Up Russia, have never been tested in a Russian court, and Russia denies them. The British public inquiry into Litvinenko's later murder called the book "more than a political tract" and "the product of careful research", without making its own finding on who was responsible.

The second war (1999–2009) reconquered Chechnya at enormous cost and installed a loyal local ruler, first Akhmad Kadyrov and later his son Ramzan. Chechen separatists, increasingly Islamist, carried out terrorist attacks including the Moscow theatre siege of 2002 and the Beslan school siege of 2004, in which hundreds of hostages died, many of them children.

Order and oil

Putin's first two terms (2000–08) coincided with rising oil prices. The economy grew by about 7 percent a year from 1999 to 2007, by World Bank figures; wages and pensions were paid on time; a middle class grew in the big cities. At the same time Putin brought independent television under state control, tamed the regional governors, and broke oligarchs who challenged him: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man and a funder of opposition parties, was arrested in 2003 and spent ten years in prison, and his Yukos oil company was taken over by the state. The tacit deal was described as prosperity in exchange for staying out of politics.

Journalists who investigated the war or corruption were in danger. Anna Politkovskaya of Novaya Gazeta, who reported on abuses in Chechnya, was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building in 2006. The same year Litvinenko died in London of polonium-210 poisoning. In 2016 a British public inquiry concluded that the FSB operation to kill him "was probably approved" by the FSB director Nikolai Patrushev "and also by President Putin". Russia denied involvement.

Turning point: 2008–2014

Barred from a third consecutive term, Putin became prime minister in 2008 while Dmitry Medvedev served as president. In August 2008, after a Georgian artillery attack on Tskhinvali in breakaway South Ossetia, Russia fought a five-day war with Georgia and then recognised South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states. The EU-commissioned Tagliavini report (2009) found that Georgia had started the large-scale fighting without legal justification, but that "much of the Russian military action went far beyond the reasonable limits of defence".

When Putin announced in 2011 that he would return to the presidency, and parliamentary elections that December were widely seen as rigged, the largest protests since the 1990s filled Moscow's Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Avenue. After his return in 2012, new laws labelled NGOs with foreign funding "foreign agents", restricted protest, and banned "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations" to minors.

In February 2014, after months of protest in Kyiv, Ukraine's pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych fled. Within days, Russian soldiers without insignia seized Crimea's parliament and key sites; a hastily organised referendum on 16 March was followed by Russia's annexation of the peninsula. On 27 March the UN General Assembly, by 100 votes to 11 with 58 abstentions, affirmed Ukraine's territorial integrity and declared that the referendum had "no validity". In the Donbas, armed separatists, backed by Russian weapons, money and, at decisive moments, regular troops, seized parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. On 17 July 2014 Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over separatist-held territory, killing all 298 on board; a Dutch court in 2022 convicted two Russians and a Ukrainian separatist of murder in their absence, and in July 2025 the European Court of Human Rights held Russia responsible. Western sanctions followed; most Russians, polls showed, greeted Crimea's annexation with enthusiasm.

In 2015 Russia intervened in Syria's civil war to save Bashar al-Assad.

Navalny

The most effective opposition figure of these years was Alexei Navalny, a lawyer whose Anti-Corruption Foundation published investigations of officials' wealth that were viewed tens of millions of times. On 20 August 2020 he collapsed on a flight from Tomsk; he was flown to Berlin, and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons later confirmed that he had been poisoned with a nerve agent of the Novichok type. He returned to Russia in January 2021, was arrested at the airport, and spent the rest of his life in prison. His movement was declared "extremist". In 2020 constitutional amendments, approved in a nationwide vote, reset Putin's term count, allowing him to run again in 2024 and 2030.

How the Kremlin explained itself

In a famous speech in Munich in 2007, Putin denounced a "unipolar" world dominated by the United States and NATO's expansion toward Russia's borders. The Kremlin's grievances, repeated ever since, are that the West promised in 1990 that NATO would not move east and broke that promise (a claim historians still argue about: no such promise was ever written into a treaty, though Western leaders made oral assurances during German reunification talks); that Western-backed "colour revolutions" in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004 and 2014) and elsewhere were plots against Russia; and that Russia has the right to a sphere of influence in its "near abroad". In July 2021 Putin published a long essay, "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians", arguing that the two were "one people" and that modern Ukraine was in large part an artificial creation of Soviet policy.

Part 12 — The full-scale war and Russia in 2026 (2022–2026)

24 February 2022

Early on 24 February 2022 Putin announced a "special military operation" whose purpose, he said, was to "protect people" who had for eight years been "facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime", and to "demilitarise and denazify Ukraine". Russian forces then invaded Ukraine from the north, east and south. Russian columns tried to take Kyiv and were driven back by the end of March; the retreat revealed mass killings of civilians in towns such as Bucha.

International bodies described the invasion in plain terms:

The Russian government rejects all of these. Its position is that it acted in self-defence against NATO's advance and to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine, and it does not recognise the ICC's jurisdiction.

The war at home

In September 2022, after Ukrainian counter-offensives near Kharkiv, Putin ordered a "partial mobilisation"; hundreds of thousands of men left the country rather than be called up. Prisoners were recruited from jails by the Wagner mercenary group, whose leader Yevgeny Prigozhin staged an armed mutiny in June 2023, marching toward Moscow before turning back; two months later he died when his plane crashed. Criticism of the war became a crime: thousands were prosecuted under laws against "discrediting" or spreading "false information" about the army. Independent media, including Novaya Gazeta, whose editor Dmitry Muratov had shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, were forced to close or move abroad.

On 16 February 2024 Navalny died at the "Polar Wolf" penal colony in Kharp, beyond the Arctic Circle, where he was serving a 19-year sentence. The prison service said he had collapsed after a walk. On 14 February 2026 the governments of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands said that laboratory analysis showed he had been killed with the toxin epibatidine, and that "only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity". The Kremlin called accusations of its involvement unfounded. A month after Navalny's death, in March 2024, Putin was re-elected for a fifth term in a vote to which the OSCE, the European election-monitoring body, was not invited.

Sanctions cut Russia off from Western finance and technology, but the economy adapted: oil and gas were redirected to China, India and Turkey; military spending surged; the economy shrank only 1.4 percent in 2022 and grew 4.1 and 4.9 percent in 2023 and 2024, by World Bank figures, before slowing to 1.0 percent in 2025, with inflation near 9 percent. Finland (2023) and Sweden (2024) joined NATO, the opposite of what the Kremlin had wanted.

For many Russians, the war's effects were indirect. Large cash bonuses paid to men who signed army contracts brought unprecedented money to poorer regions; defence factories ran round the clock and wages rose amid labour shortages. Western brands left and were replaced by local copies or imports through third countries. Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them young and educated, emigrated to Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Israel and the European Union. Inside Russia, the state expanded patriotic education in schools, and new history textbooks presented the "special military operation" as a defensive necessity. Ukrainian drones increasingly struck Russian refineries, airfields and cities; on the last day of the September 2026 Duma elections a drone strike on Moscow killed two people.

Where things stand in 2026

As of late October 2026 the war continues. The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, said on 2 October that "frontlines barely move" while attacks on civilians and energy infrastructure intensify; the UN monitoring mission counted 2,570 civilians killed in Ukraine in the first nine months of 2026, 59 percent more than in the same period of 2025. In 2026 American, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators held direct talks, in Abu Dhabi in January and Geneva in February, without an agreement. Russia's stated terms, set out by Putin in June 2024, include the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the whole of the four Ukrainian regions it claims, and a commitment that Ukraine will never join NATO.

Inside Russia, the independent Levada Center (itself labelled a "foreign agent") reported in January 2026 that support for the army remained high and that three-quarters of respondents expected a Russian victory, while a majority preferred peace talks to continued fighting. In the September 2026 Duma elections, as described at the start of this history, United Russia won a record majority with every anti-war party excluded. In the Novgorod region, where Yabloko was allowed to run for the regional assembly, it won just over 6 percent.

Russia's population was about 143.5 million in 2025 (World Bank), shrinking from its post-Soviet peak, with large losses of young men to the war and to emigration. Life expectancy had recovered from about 65 in the mid-1990s to about 73 in 2024.

Part 13 — How to understand Russia today

Three ways Russians and their neighbours tell this story

The Kremlin's narrative. Russia is a distinct civilisation, the heir of Kyivan Rus', Byzantium and the Orthodox faith, which has repeatedly saved itself and Europe from invaders: the Mongols, the Poles in 1612, Napoleon, Hitler. Its strength has always depended on a strong central state, and its moments of weakness (the Troubles, 1917, the 1990s) brought chaos and foreign humiliation. The collapse of the USSR left millions of Russians outside Russia's borders; the West exploited Russia's weakness, expanded NATO despite promises, and backed coups on its borders. Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are one people, and the war in Ukraine is a defensive struggle against the West, fought on Russia's historical lands. Officially, the Soviet past is honoured for victory in 1945 and great-power status; Stalin's repressions are acknowledged as a tragedy but not allowed to overshadow the victory.

The Russian liberal and opposition view. Russia's tragedy is not the outside world but the repeated triumph of the state over society: serfdom, the autocracy that crushed 1825 and dissolved the Dumas, Bolshevik terror, the Gulag, and now a security-service regime that has jailed or killed its critics and launched a ruinous war. Russia is a European country, and its best traditions (the Great Reforms, the zemstvos, the 1905 constitution, the dissidents, Memorial, the free press of the 1990s, the protests of 2011–12) show that it could be a democracy. Imperial nostalgia, in this view, is the disease, and the war in Ukraine is a crime committed in Russia's name. Many who hold this view now live abroad; inside Russia, saying so can lead to prison.

The neighbours' view. For Ukrainians, Poles, Balts, Georgians, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Kazakhs and others, Russian history is in large part the story of an empire that conquered them, tried to erase their languages and identities, deported or starved their peoples, and, after 1991, has tried again to control them. They point to the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, Katyn, the 1944 deportations, the Holodomor, 1956 and 1968, Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea and the war since 2022. Many Russians are startled to hear their liberation story of 1945 described as occupation. Many of Russia's neighbours are startled that Russians find this hard to hear.

Each of these accounts captures something real. The facts in this history are not in dispute among serious historians; their meaning is.

Key dates

Who's who

Five ideas that unlock the country

1. The state came first, and the people paid for it. From the Mongol tribute to Peter's poll tax to Stalin's grain requisitions, Russian states have extracted resources from a poor, vast, cold country to sustain armies and expansion. Serfdom was created by the state, for the state. This is why "the state" (gosudarstvo) and "the people" (narod) are often spoken of in Russian as separate things.

2. Empire before nation. Russia became an empire before it became a nation-state, and it has never been one without the other. Russian speakers live across the former Soviet space; dozens of other nations live inside Russia. The question "where does Russia end?" has never been settled in Russian minds, and the war in Ukraine is, among other things, a war about the answer.

3. Reform comes from above, and then stalls. Peter, Alexander II, Stolypin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev: each tried to modernise from the top, each opened space for society, and each period was followed by reaction. Russian liberals hope the cycle can be broken; their opponents argue that reform without a strong hand always ends in chaos.

4. Memory is politics. The Great Patriotic War, the 1990s, Stalin, Kyivan Rus': in Russia, history is not background but an active argument, taught in state textbooks and fought over in courts. Memorial, which documented Soviet repression, was closed by court order; the official memory of 1945 is protected by law.

5. There has always been another Russia. The Decembrists, the zemstvo doctors, the 1905 deputies, Sakharov and the dissidents, the journalists of Novaya Gazeta, the crowds of August 1991 and of 2011–12, and those who took flowers to Navalny's memorials in 2024 are as much a part of Russian history as the tsars and the commissars. Every authoritarian period in Russian history has eventually ended. What comes after has not been predetermined.

"Russia cannot be understood with the mind," wrote the poet Fyodor Tyutchev in 1866; "in Russia one can only believe." Russians quote it fondly. Historians would gently disagree: Russia can be understood with the mind, as long as one listens to all of its voices.

The takeaway

Russia grew from the river principalities of Kyivan Rus', through two centuries of Mongol overlordship, into a Muscovite autocracy that conquered Siberia, the steppe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Its empire was built on serfdom, which lasted until 1861; its revolution of 1917 promised liberation and produced Stalin's famines, terror and Gulag, and then victory over Nazism at the cost of perhaps 20 to 27 million Soviet lives. The Soviet Union ended peacefully in 1991; the 1990s brought freedom and economic collapse; Vladimir Putin's long rule brought stability, then repression, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and, from 2022, a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that the UN General Assembly deplored as aggression. In 2026 the war continues, the opposition is in prison, exile or dead, and the country's argument with itself about empire, the state and freedom is unresolved.

Try this: pick one date from the Key dates table (1612, 1812, 1861, 1941 or 1991 work well) and find out how it is described in three places: an official Russian source (the Kremlin website or a state museum), a Russian independent outlet in exile such as Meduza, and a source from one of Russia's neighbours. Notice what each one chooses to emphasise, and what each leaves out.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Glenn E. Curtis (ed.), Russia: A Country Study (Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1998): chronology and historical chapters from Kyivan Rus' to 1997, including serf emancipation, Bloody Sunday, the civil war, the Second World War and the 1990s.
- Nicolas Werth, articles on dekulakisation, the Great Terror, the Kazakh famine and the wartime deportations, Mass Violence and Resistance research network, Sciences Po (online encyclopedia).
- Mark Harrison (University of Warwick), review of R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (2004); Paul R. Gregory, Terror by Quota and Gulag statistics (Hoover Institution); Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies), "Famine-Genocide of 1932–3".
- National WWII Museum, "Research Starters: Worldwide Deaths in World War II"; Demoscope Weekly (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), estimates of losses in the Chechen wars.
- UN General Assembly resolutions 68/262 (27 March 2014), ES-11/1 (2 March 2022) and ES-11/4 (12 October 2022); International Court of Justice, order of 16 March 2022 in Ukraine v. Russian Federation; International Criminal Court press releases (17 March 2023 and later).
- President of Russia website (en.kremlin.ru): Putin's article "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" (12 July 2021), address of 24 February 2022, and speech of 14 June 2024.
- UK Litvinenko Inquiry report (HC 695, January 2016); EU Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia (Tagliavini report, 2009); OPCW technical assistance report on Navalny (October 2020); statement by five European governments on Navalny's death (14 February 2026), as reported by the Guardian.
- UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, protection of civilians update to 30 September 2026 (published 16 October 2026); UN News reports of September–October 2026.
- Levada Center, survey report on attitudes to the war (January 2026); Euronews/AFP on the preliminary September 2026 Duma results (21 September 2026); Meduza on the Central Election Commission's final results (25 September 2026); Meduza on Yabloko's removal from the ballot (10 August 2026); OSCE/ODIHR statement on the 2024 presidential election.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated October 2026): GDP growth, inflation, population and life expectancy.

Go deeper
- 📘 Russia and the Russians: A History — Geoffrey Hosking (the best single-volume history, with a clear thread about state and people)
- 📘 Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia — Orlando Figes (Russian identity told through its writers, painters and composers)
- 📘 A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 — Orlando Figes (the revolution from the streets and villages)
- 📘 The Gulag Archipelago — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (the survivor's history that changed how the world saw the USSR; read the abridged edition)
- 📘 Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets — Svetlana Alexievich (Nobel laureate's oral history of ordinary people living through 1991 and after)
- 🌐 Mass Violence & Resistance, Sciences Po (scholarly articles on Soviet repression, by Werth and others)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Russia: A Condensed History of Tsars, Revolution, and Empire; A Brief History of Ukraine (this series); Leaders of the 1930s; Propaganda, Misinformation & How to Resist It