Russia historical timeline

Origins

Kievan Rus’ formed in the ninth century when Norse traders took control of the river routes running south through Slavic lands to Byzantium. In 988 Vladimir accepted Orthodox Christianity from Constantinople, which brought with it the Cyrillic alphabet and an ecclesiastical orientation towards the east rather than Rome. The Mongols destroyed Rus’ in 1237 and held it for two centuries, and Moscow — an unimportant town that was good at collecting their tribute — emerged as the dominant principality by the time Ivan III stopped paying in 1480.

Turning points

Ivan IV was crowned tsar in 1547 and turned the state east; within a century Russian fur traders had crossed Siberia to the Pacific, an expansion covering a third of the northern hemisphere. Peter the Great forced a westernisation on the country and built St Petersburg on a swamp in 1703 to face Europe. Napoleon reached Moscow in 1812 and left in ruins. Serfdom was abolished in 1861, two revolutions came in 1917, and a civil war produced the Soviet Union. Stalin’s industrialisation, the famine of the early 1930s and the Terror ran into a war that killed around twenty-seven million Soviet citizens — a figure that explains a great deal about how the period is remembered. Sputnik went up in 1957 and Gagarin in 1961. The Union dissolved in 1991, the 1990s brought economic collapse, and Vladimir Putin has led the country since 1999.

Influential people

Vladimir the Great, who chose the religion. Peter I and Catherine II, who chose the direction. Pushkin, who effectively made the modern literary language, and then Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Gogol within a single century. Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky. Mendeleev, who arranged the elements. Lenin and Stalin. Gagarin. And Gorbachev, whose reforms ended a system he was trying to save.

Cultural evolution

Orthodoxy shapes the calendar and the architecture, and the alphabet arrived with it. The nineteenth-century novel is the country’s largest cultural export, and its ballet — the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky — has set the standard for the form for a hundred and fifty years. The dacha, a plot outside the city with a hut and vegetables on it, is a near-universal institution, and the banya is a social one. And the scale is the fact underneath everything: eleven time zones, and more than a hundred and ninety recognised ethnic groups.

Present-day significance

Russia remains one of the largest exporters of oil, gas, wheat and metals, with those flows redirected substantially towards Asia since 2022. Its full-scale invasion of Ukraine that year brought the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a major economy, ended most of its remaining ties to Western institutions, and is the fact that now frames its relations with nearly everyone.