VI.

History

In this section, before the revolution of 1917, the term “Russia” refers to the Russian Empire or, more narrowly, to the land of the “Great” Russians—that is, the land of the people known today just as Russians. “Great Russia” was one of the three Slavic lands ruled by the first tsars of the Russian Empire, whose full title was “Grand Prince and Tsar of the Great, the Little, and the White Russians”. Today the “Little” Russians are known as Ukrainians; only the “White” Russians, or Belorussians are still known by their historical name. References after December 25, 1991, relate to the independent Russian Federation.

At its greatest extent, in 1914, the Russian Empire included about 22 million sq km (8.5 million sq mi), an estimated one sixth of the land area of the Earth, divided into four general regions: Russia proper, comprising the easternmost part of Europe and including the Grand Duchy of Finland and most of Poland; the Caucasus; all of northern Asia, or Siberia; and Russian Central Asia, divided into the regions of the Steppes, in the south-west, and Russian Turkistan, in the south-east.

A.

Origins of the Russian People

During the pre-Christian era the vast territory that became Russia was sparsely inhabited by groups of nomadic peoples, many of which were described by Greek and Roman writers. The largely unknown north, a region of extensive forests, was inhabited by groups later known collectively as Slavs, the ancestors of the modern Russian people. Far more important was the south, where the indeterminate region known as Scythia was occupied by a succession of Asian peoples, including, chronologically, the Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians. In these early times, Greek traders and colonists established many trading posts and settlements, particularly along the north coast of the Black Sea and in the Crimea.

A.1.

Invasions by Early Inhabitants

Migratory movements by exterior peoples were facilitated by the stretches of open plain. Such migrations resulted in successive invasions, the establishment of settlements, and the assimilation of new ethnological elements. Thus, in the early centuries of the Christian era, the Asian peoples of Scythia were displaced by the Goths, who established an Ostrogothic kingdom on the Black Sea. In the 4th century ad the invading Huns conquered and thereafter expelled the Goths, destroying Scythia. The Huns held the territory constituting present-day Ukraine and the region of Bessarabia (now mostly within the republic of Moldova) until their defeat in western Europe in 451. Later came the Avars, followed by the Magyars, and the Khazars, who remained influential until about the mid-10th century.

Meanwhile, during this long period of successive invasions, the Slavic peoples dwelling north-east of the Carpathian Mountains had begun a series of migratory movements. As these migrations took place, the western peoples eventually evolved as the Moravians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks; the southern peoples as the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and the slavicized Bulgars; and the eastern peoples as the modern Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians. The Eastern Slavs became renowned traders, and the systems of rivers and waterways extending through the territory from the Valday Hills facilitated the establishment first of Slav trading posts, notably at Kiev (now in Ukraine) in the south, and Novgorod, in the north. Eventually these early Slavic people began to cultivate the land, and towns and villages were established protected by citadels, or kremlins, build from wood cut from the abundant forests. Gradually they occupied the area extending from what is now St Petersburg south to Kiev and spoke a language quite similar to modern Russian. The Valday Hills region in north-western Russia is the high point of the eastern European plain and the source of most of its rivers. The easy portages in this region allowed the transport of goods from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Most of the expansion and migratory movements of the Eastern Slavs were along the river routes from the Valday Hills. Control of this strategic region was an important element in the Russian domination of eastern Europe.

A.2.

The House of Rurik

The political organization of the Eastern Slavs was still largely tribal; they had created no unified system through which their constant tribal conflicts could be resolved. By the 9th century they were also coming under pressure from Scandinavians, Vikings known locally as Varangians, who, stimulated by land-hunger, began migrating south, combining trade and piracy with colonization. According to Russian tradition recorded in the Primary Russian Chronicle, the chief source of much of early Russian history, internal dissension and feuds among the Eastern Slavs around Novgorod became so violent that they voluntarily chose to invite one of the Varangian princes, Rurik, or Ryurik, to unite them. Contemporary historians believe that he probably came to power through conquest. However, whether “invited” or not, in around 862 Rurik was established, with his brothers, as ruler of Novgorod. According to the chronicle, two other Scandinavians, Dir and Askold, possibly legendary figures, gained control of Kiev, although it may have remained in Slavic hands. Thus, 862 is considered the beginning of the Russian Empire. The name Rossiya, or Russia, is derived from “land of the Rus” (the Rus is the name by which the territory’s inhabitants were known). The establishment of Rurik and the dynasty he founded initiated a period of internal consolidation, expansion of Slav territory, and the spread of the Slavic people, notably towards the north-east and north-west, where the native Finnic strains were largely absorbed or replaced by Slavs.

Rurik was succeeded in 879 by his son Igor (reigned 913-945), a child for whom Oleg, Rurik’s kinsman, ruled as regent. Prince Oleg, realizing the value of the Kiev region, had the rulers of that city killed in 882 and then united the two centres, establishing his capital at Kiev two years later. He extended the rule of the state known as Kievan Rus considerably, subduing neighbouring peoples. In the early 10th century he led his armies as far south as Constantinople (now İstanbul), called Tsaringrad by the Slavs. After a successful attack he “hung his shield on the gate of Tsargard”, meaning that he collected tribute and, subsequently, in 911, concluded a commercial treaty with Byzantium. This was the first authentically dated event in Russian history. From that time cultural and trade relations with the Byzantine Empire became steadily closer as Kievan Rus relaxed its links with Scandinavia. Igor assumed power in 913, and in 945 he was succeeded by his widow, Olga, who was baptized a Christian in Constantinople in 957. In 962 Olga abdicated in favour of her son, Svyatoslav, the first prince of Kievan Rus to bear a Slav and not a Scandinavian name. Svyatoslav, who was a great military leader and also a militant pagan, devoted himself to strengthening the Kievan Rus position in the south. He led his troops successfully against the Khazars in the south-east. He was less successful in his attacks on the Bulgars and on the Pechenegs, a warlike, nomadic people of the Black Sea steppes, at whose hands he was eventually killed, in 972. Svyatoslav built a great empire, and commerce and crafts increased during his reign.

The empire was divided among the prince’s three sons, causing dynastic conflicts that were ended in 980, when the youngest son, Vladimir I (see Vladimir, St), later known as Vladimir the Great, became sole ruler. The most significant event of his reign was his conversion to Byzantine Christianity in 988 and the institution of that religion as the official religion of the Russian people. His conversion was the result of a deliberate decision to select a monotheistic religion for his people, and Muslim as well as Christian missionaries were invited to the court to debate the merits of their religions. Legend has it that he rejected Islam because it forbids alcoholic drink. After subsequently casting off his many pagan wives and concubines, Vladimir married Anne, sister of the Byzantine Emperor Basil II. From its inception, the Russian Orthodox Church differed from its Byzantine parent. Services were offered in liturgical Slavonic, and the Church enjoyed a large measure of autonomy, even though it remained under the canonical authority of the patriarch of Constantinople and the Russian ruler was in fact its supreme head. Monasteries and churches were built in Byzantine style, however, and Byzantine culture ultimately became the predominant influence in such fields as architecture, art, and music.

Upon the death of Vladimir in 1015, his dominions were divided among his sons, and strife immediately developed. Vladimir’s eldest son, Svyatopolk, called The Accursed (reigned 1015, 1018-1019), held the supreme power and, to secure his position, murdered his brothers Boris and Gleb. Svyatopolk was, in turn, defeated and deposed by his brother Yaroslav the Wise, Prince of Novgorod. Yaroslav attempted to recreate the empire of his grandfather, Svyatoslav, and by 1036 had succeeded in making himself ruler of all Russia. With him, Kiev Rus reached its greatest power. Yaroslav made Kiev an imperial capital with magnificent buildings, including the notable Hagia Sophia of Kiev (Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom). Schools were opened, and the Grand Duke revised the first Russian law code, the Russkaya Pravda (Russian Truth). To consolidate the position of his heirs, Yaroslav devised a system of precedence, grading the various principalities from the smallest to Kiev, the most powerful, so that, as a grand duke of Kiev died, each vassal below him was moved to a larger principality, ending with the throne of Kiev.

A.3.

The Decline of Kiev

Although this unique pattern of precedence was nominally practised, Yaroslav’s death in 1054 signalled the decline of Kiev. His sons shared the empire, and each prince tended to divide his lands among his own sons. Russia became a group of petty states almost continuously at war with one another. One final attempt was made to unite the country by Yaroslav’s grandson, Vladimir II Monomachus, but his death in 1125 ended efforts to form an alliance, and the fragmentation continued. Other states challenged Kiev’s supremacy, particularly Galicia and Volhynia in the west; Suzdal, in the upper and central parts of the Volga basin; Chernigov and Novgorod-Severskiy, in the Desna basin; Polatsk, which included the basins of the Daugava (also known as Western Dvina) and the Beresina; Smolensk, occupying the upper parts of the basin of the Daugava and the Dnepr; and Novgorod, by far the largest, occupying the land bounded by the Gulf of Finland, Lake Peipus, the upper reaches of the Volga, the White Sea, and the Northern Dvina River.

The decline of Kiev was due in part to loss of trade following the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 and the consequent migration of the people of Kiev to the north. Novgorod became a flourishing commercial state, which rose to a dominant position and in the 13th century was made the site of a major factory of the Hanseatic League. Kiev also lost its importance as the great national and cultural centre, its place taken by the cities of Suzdal, Vladimir, and, ultimately, Moscow (founded as a village about 1147). Russia became a loose federation of city-states, held together by a common language, religion, traditions, and customs and ruled by members of the multitudinous House of Rurik, usually at war with one another. Difficulties resulted also from depredations on the frontiers. In the west the Poles, Lithuanians, and the Teutonic Knights encroached on Russian territory. In the south it was constantly raided by the Polovtzy nomads; one of these raids was the subject of the Russian epic The Lay of Igor’s Host.

A.4.

The Mongol Invasion

In the early 13th century a greater danger than any of these menaced Russia from the east. In 1223 the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan appeared in the south-east. The Polovtzy sent for help to the Russian princes, who came to their aid against this common, greater foe. In 1223, in the Battle of the Kalka River (now Kalmius River), the Polovtzy-Russian coalition was completely routed. After their victory, however, the Mongols were recalled to Asia by the Khan and retreated as rapidly as they had come. For 12 years, they made no move in the direction of Russia. Then, in 1237, Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, led the Mongols back to eastern Russia. On their northward march they captured and destroyed every town from Kiev to Moscow.

The Mongol sweep was finally halted by the difficult terrain of the forests and swamps south of Novgorod, and Batu Khan was forced to change the direction of his armies. In 1240 he swept over the south-west, destroying Kiev after a desperate defence by that city. The Tatars ravaged Poland and Hungary and progressed as far east as Moravia. In 1242 Batu established his capital at Sarai on the lower Volga (near modern Volgograd), and founded the khanate known as the Golden Horde, which was virtually independent of the Mongol Empire.

In addition to the havoc it created in Russia, the Mongol invasion was determinative in later Russian history. Tatar control destroyed the elements of self-government by representative assembly that had developed in some Russian cities, arrested the progress of industry and culture, and kept Russia more than two centuries behind the countries of western Europe. Tatar customs, law, and government made their influence felt. The region of Kiev was largely depopulated because of massacres and because much of the Russian population had fled west to escape the Mongol advance. One group, culturally influenced by the Poles and Lithuanians, eventually became known as Belorussians, or White Russians. A second group, formed of the Slavic population from the region of Kiev and adjacent regions, became known as Little Russians, or Malorussians. The region of old Kiev, influenced by foreign languages and customs that were superimposed on the traditions of the old Rus, came to be called Ukraine. In northern Russia, the inhabitants became the principal group of Russian Slavs known as the Great Russians, modified principally by various branches of the Finno-Ugrian population.

Although the Mongols did not attack Novgorod, north-western Russia was menaced by invaders from the west at the same time. The Swedes descended from the Baltic and sought to penetrate the territories of Novgorod. In 1240 a Swedish army landed on the banks of the Neva, and the Prince of Novgorod, Alexander Yaroslavevich, led a Russian army to meet them. The prince so completely defeated the Swedes that he was thenceforth known as Alexander Nevsky, meaning “of the Neva”. Two years later the Teutonic Knights, a religious military order, advanced from the west. Alexander led his troops to meet the Germans, crossing the frozen Lake Peipus, and routed them. Faced with continuing danger in the west, Alexander, rather than risk invasion from the south, adopted a policy of loyal submission to the Golden Horde and conciliation with the Khan. In 1246 Alexander succeeded his father as Grand Prince of Novgorod and in 1252 was invested by the khan as Grand Prince of Vladimir and Suzdal. Most of the Russian princes followed Alexander’s example, paying tribute and considering themselves vassals of the Tatar rule. In 1299 the metropolitan bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church fled the ruined city of Kiev and took up residence in the town of Vladimir, seat of the grand prince.

B.

The Growing Importance of Moscow

The town of Moscow, in the principality of Vladimir Suzdal, occupied an exceedingly favourable geographical position in the centre of Russia and on the principal trade routes. In 1263 Alexander Nevsky gave Moscow to his younger son, Daniel, progenitor of a line of powerful Muscovite princes. These rulers were astute men who worked closely with the khans. As Mongol favourites they gradually extended their lands by annexing surrounding territories. In 1328 Daniel’s son, Ivan I, Prince of Muscovy was appointed Grand Prince by the Khan. He moved the seat of the grand prince from Vladimir to Moscow, and seems to have influenced the metropolitan of the Russian Church to follow suit. Thus, given the sanction of the Church, the Muscovite princes began to organize a new Russian state, with themselves as rulers. Beginning with Ivan, the Princes of Muscovy styled themselves princes “of all Russia”. He was helped in his claim by the fact that he collected large tributes from the northern territories for the khanate, earning him the nickname Ivan “Moneybags” (Kalita).

In the mid-14th century internal dissensions weakened the power of the Golden Horde. During the reign of Ivan II (1353-1359), the khans lost the right to appoint the grand prince. Ivan II’s son, Dmitry, led the first successful Russian revolt against the Mongols. In 1380 his decisive victory over the Mongols at Kulikovo, on the banks of the Don River, gave him his surname Donskoy (“of the Don”) and marked the turning point of Mongol power. Muscovite strength grew steadily thereafter.

B.1.

The Expansion of Muscovy

Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, and the Russian Orthodox Church thereafter considered Moscow the “third Rome”, successor to Constantinople and the centre of Christian Orthodoxy. The title of the Metropolitan of Kiev was changed to “the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia”, and the Church came under the authority of the Grand Prince, further enhancing the power of Muscovy. The two-headed eagle of Byzantium was incorporated into the Muscovite arms and regarded as the symbol of Holy Russia. A large factor in this investiture of Moscow as a holy, imperial city was the marriage in 1472 of Grand Prince Ivan III Vasilyevich to Zoë (Sophia), niece of the last Byzantine emperor. The Grand Prince began to regard himself as the Tsar (derived from “caesar”), the autocratic sovereign, rather than the head of the nobility. He incorporated into Muscovy the states of Novgorod in 1478 and Tver in 1485. In 1480, taking advantage of strife among the Mongols which had divided the Golden Horde into several separate khanates, he refused to pay the annual tribute. The Mongols were too disorganized to enforce payment, and the date is regarded as the end of Tatar domination. Once free of Tatar rule, Ivan turned his attention to the western part of former Kievan Rus, then controlled by Lithuania and Poland. He invaded Lithuanian territory in 1492 and 1500; at the end of hostilities in 1503 Moscow controlled many of the borderlands. During his long reign (1462-1505) Ivan, who became known as “the Great” (Veliky), also rebuilt Moscow; the Uspensky (Assumption) and Blagoveshchensky (Annunciation) cathedrals in the Kremlin date from this period, as do the Granovitaya (Palace of Facets) and most of the Kremlin walls and towers. Ivan’s son and successor, Basil III Ivanovich (1505-1533), followed his father’s aggressive policy of expansion to the west; he annexed Pskov in 1510, captured Smolensk in 1514, and absorbed the nominally independent grand duchy of Ryazan in 1521. Russian policy thus became, externally, the continued territorial aggrandizement of Muscovy and, internally, the formalization of autocratic rule with concomitant social change.

Ivan IV Vasilyevich (1547-1584), called The Terrible or Awesome, became ruler in 1533 at the age of three, and during his long minority the state was continually torn by a struggle for dominance among the boyar, or noble, class. In 1547 Ivan assumed the throne and became the first Muscovite Grand Prince to be formally crowned as Tsar; in the same year he married Anastasia Romanovna, a member of the Romanov family. Ivan opposed the old nobility because of the strife that had disrupted his childhood, and in 1549 he called the first Zemsky Sobor, an irregular national assembly, representing all classes of Russian society except the peasants. His aim was to consolidate his autocratic position by weakening the power of the boyars and the Church. In December 1564, Ivan left Moscow and announced that he had abdicated; the following January he agreed to resume the throne after receiving absolute powers. Returning to Moscow, he seized half of Muscovy as his personal property. This territory, called the oprichnina, was a separate administrative unit ruled directly by the Tsar. Ivan distributed it among his supporters as rewards for military and personal service, thereby establishing a new service corps called oprichniki. In return for the land, the oprichniki acted as Ivan’s personal police force. When the boyars, resentful of their diminishing power, plotted against him, Ivan resorted to torture, exile, and execution to repress them.

In 1552 Muscovite armies conquered and annexed the Tatar kingdom of Kazan; Astrakhan, another Mongol stronghold, became a Russian territory in 1556. Ivan ordered the construction of St Basil’s Cathedral to commemorate these victories. The pacification of the southern and eastern frontiers opened the eastern territories to Russian colonization. Muscovy borderlands were increasingly settled by warlike mercenaries known as Cossacks, many of them runaway peasants. They were concentrated particularly in the Don River basin and around the lower Volga. Some Cossacks went farther north, and in 1581 a Cossack hetman (leader) Yermak Timofeyevich led an expedition east across the Ural Mountains for the Stroganov family, one of the wealthiest families in Russia, which had an exclusive licence to operate factories in the Urals and beyond. Ivan warned Yermak against stirring up the inhabitants of the area but forgave him when, between 1581 and 1583, he brought most of the Ob’ River basin under Russian rule, thus beginning the conquest of Siberia. It was Ivan who agreed to allow the Cossacks to keep runaway peasants, and to keep their landholdings and a semblance of political autonomy in return for them becoming his frontier guards, and agreeing “to do battle for the Crown” whenever required. Thus the Cossacks became free landholders who could, in a matter of hours, assemble themselves into fully armed cavalry units to fight the tsar’s enemies—at home or abroad. In the west, Ivan led his forces to the Baltic Sea and between 1558 and 1583 fought the Livonian War against Poland and Sweden for possession of the Baltic. As a result of his eventual defeat Russia lost her far northern territories and access to the Baltic. During his reign Ivan concluded several trade treaties with England. He also imported many foreign technical and professional experts, a practice continued throughout the history of the Russian monarchy. Although Ivan’s name is perpetuated as The Terrible for the savage cruelty and excesses of his later reign, he founded a strong Russian state and set the pattern for supreme tsarist rule.

Shortly before his death Ivan had killed his eldest son and heir (also Ivan) in a fit of rage. His next son, Fyodor I, was sickly and feeble-minded, and during his reign (1584-1598) he was dominated by his brother-in-law, the powerful boyar Boris Godunov, who had been elected Regent. Directed by Boris, the Russian state continued to increase in wealth and prestige. The discontent of the peasants was augmented in 1597, however, by a law binding the serfs to the soil and legalizing serfdom. In 1598, Fyodor died childless, ending the House of Rurik; Ivan’s third son, Dmitry Ivanovich, had died in suspicious circumstances in 1591. Boris was elected Tsar by a Zemsky Sobor (National Assembly). Although he ruled with ability, his hold on the throne was uneasy because of the widely held belief that he had murdered Dmitry. The mystery surrounding Dmitry’s death made possible the appearance of pretenders to his name and ranks, inaugurating a period of unrest and revolt that was known as the Smutnoye Vremya (Time of Troubles).

B.2.

Time of Troubles

In 1604 a pretender to the throne calling himself Dmitry I, and known as the False Dmitry, gained Polish and Lithuanian support, as well as the backing of various discontented boyars. Three months after the death of Boris in 1605, Dmitry I entered Moscow at the head of a Polish army and was crowned Tsar; he was murdered the following year. The boyars then elevated Prince Basil Shuysky to the throne. This move was opposed by the Cossacks and rebellious peasants, who chafed under oppressive serf laws and feared the severity of boyar rule. They rose in southern Russia and joined a second pretender, Dmitry II, who was already advancing on Moscow. At the same time King Sigismund III of Poland, himself desirous of the Russian throne, invaded from the west, and Sweden, at the request of Basil, sent armed support for the boyar tsar. After a long period of fighting and intrigue Basil was deposed in 1610, and the throne was left vacant. Some boyars advanced the candidacy of Władisław, the son of Sigismund, and a Polish army entered Moscow, setting itself up as the Russian authority. The entire country then fell into a state of anarchy.

The situation was at last resolved by the initiative of Kuzma Minin, a Nizhniy Novgorod butcher, who succeeded in raising a national army in north-east Russia. Under Prince Dmitry Mikhailovich Pozharsky, who gained the help of some Cossacks, this army marched on Moscow and in 1612 expelled the Poles. In 1613 a Zemsky Sobor, representing the chief towns and the Church, elected Michael Fedorovich Romanov, member of an influential boyar family and great-nephew of Anastasia Romanovna, as Tsar. Michael thus founded the House of Romanov that would rule Russia for the next 300 years.

B.3.

Romanov Rule

Although social discontent had been one of the primary characteristics of the period known as the Time of Troubles, no real reforms ensued. The greatest effects of the chaotic period were the irreparable ruin of the old boyar nobility and the rise in power of the small landed nobility.

Under the first two Romanovs, Michael Fedorovich (1613-1645) and his son, Alexis I (1645-1676), new laws gave the noble landlords more power over serfs. A law code (Ulozhenie) adopted in 1649 only increased the number of refugee serfs, many of whom fled to the Cossack settlements along the lower Volga, Dnepr, and Don rivers. In 1670, under the leadership of a Don Cossack hetman, Stenka (Stephen) Razin, a great agrarian revolt began in south-eastern Russia; it was quelled with great difficulty by the Tsar’s troops a year later. This first major peasant revolt set the pattern for later uprisings by the serfs, who directed their anger at the landed nobility who enslaved them, rather than at the Tsar.

Russia, meanwhile, was advancing to the status of a European power, and in the urban centres influences from western Europe were at last penetrating the isolation caused by the Mongol invasion. Reform in the traditional viewpoints and practices of Moscow was necessary to form a basis for cultural reconciliation with its former territories, regained against Poland and Lithuania. In 1654 the Cossacks of Ukraine, rebelling against Polish rule, offered their allegiance to Tsar Alexis. In the resulting war with Poland (1654-1667), Russia was victorious, regaining Smolensk (lost in 1611) as well as the eastern Ukraine, including Kiev. The reincorporation of Ukraine hastened reforms in the rituals of the Russian Church. Ukraine was a metropolitan district of the patriarchate of Constantinople and, in order to integrate western Russia with Moscow, the Ukrainian Church had to be induced to accept the Moscow patriarch. The Russian religious leader Nikon, who had become patriarch of Russia in 1652, introduced reforms into the Russian rituals that caused a great schism (1654) in the Orthodox Church, as many of the Russian clergy and laity refused to abandon their centuries-old rituals. At a Church council in 1667 the traditionalist dissenters, who were called the Old Believers, or Raskolniki, were declared schismatics. Thus, millions of Old Believers found themselves excluded from full participation in Russian life. Many were tortured or hanged; many more fled to the northern woods to escape persecution.

Alexis was succeeded by his eldest son, Fyodor III in 1676; during his short rule, Russia successfully fought its first war against the Ottoman Empire. On Fyodor’s death in 1682 there was a new struggle for the throne. His half-brother, Peter the Great, was named Tsar (Peter I), but Peter’s older half-sister, Sophia Alekseyevna, succeeded in having her own brother, the weak-minded Ivan V, declared Senior Co-Ruler, with herself as Regent. After an attempt to deprive Peter of his right to the throne and, this failing, to assassinate both him and his mother, Sophia was forced to resign all power in 1689.

C.

The Russian Empire

The accession of Peter I to the tsardom in 1682 marked the beginning of a period during which Russia became a major European power. With an intense curiosity, he opened Russia to the West and became the first tsar to travel extensively outside the country, bringing back with him many new ideas.

C.1.

Peter the Great

Peter was greatly attracted by the culture of Western Europe, particularly that of Prussia, and to the naval technology of England. In 1695 he initiated the construction of the Russian navy. The following year, the ships were used to great effect against the Turks in the Sea of Azov, at the mouth of the Don, giving Russia an outlet to the Black Sea. In 1697 Peter led a technical and diplomatic mission to England, France, and Germany; he was absent from Russia for 18 months, during which time he worked as a shipbuilder in the Netherlands. Peter attempted, by decrees and forced reforms, to transform the traditional society of Moscow into a Western one and to make Russia a major power in Europe. He decreed the reorganization of the Russian army and navy, government, and society along Western lines. By direct orders, he encouraged the development of Russian industry and trade, technical training, education, and the sciences, instituting the first census and state postal service. He also tolerated new religions, allowing the practices of Catholics, Lutherans, and Protestants, and expressed approval of Galileo’s then-heretical theories about the solar system. During his reign, Peter also began a series of great territorial acquisitions. His greatest military campaigns were in the west, and his principal conflict, the Great Northern War (1700-1721), was with the strongest Baltic power of the time, Sweden. Control of the Baltic Sea was necessary for the creation of a great navy and the expansion of Russian foreign trade. Peter’s forces were badly defeated by the Swedes at Narva (now in Estonia) in 1700. The Swedes, however, did not pursue the Russians, thus enabling Peter to reorganize his forces and attack Swedish bases in Livonia. In 1703 he began the construction, at the cost of many lives (100,000 workers died in the first year alone) and under difficult working conditions, of his new and resplendent capital city of St Petersburg. Built on marshland territory taken from Sweden, St Petersburg within a decade was a city of 35,000 stone buildings (builders of traditional Russian wooden buildings risked banishment), many designed by well-known foreign architects. In 1714 it became Russia’s capital, when the government moved there from Moscow. By the time of Peter’s death in 1725, the city had more than 75,000 inhabitants. During the next 150 years, especially during the reign of Catherine the Great, St Petersburg was the focus of Russia’s golden age, attracting writers, dancers, artists, composers, and scientists.

The Russian army crushed the Swedes at Poltava, in 1709, and Russia gained supremacy in the Baltic. By the terms of the Treaty of Nystad (August 30, 1721), Russia acquired Livonia, Estonia, Ingria, part of Karelia, and several Baltic islands. With Russian dominance in northern Europe, the Byzantine conception of the tsar was exchanged for the Latin conception and title of Emperor; when Peter was formally proclaimed Emperor in 1721, the Muscovite state became the Russian Empire.

C.2.

Peter’s Successors

Peter’s strong rule was followed by a period of weakness on the throne. His son, Alexis, had been charged with treason and died in prison in 1718, probably from torture. The throne went to Peter’s second wife, Catherine I. After her death in 1727 it passed to a succession of rulers as a result of intrigues and coups, often engineered by the palace guards. Peter II, the son of Alexis, was chosen Emperor after Catherine; he was succeeded in 1730 by Anna Ivanovna, daughter of Ivan V. Anna, a Duchess of Courland, firmly established the court at St Petersburg and filled it with her Prussian favourites; she ruled as a despot. She was succeeded in 1740 by Ivan VI, an eight-week-old grand-nephew. A palace conspiracy the next year placed Elizabeth Petrovna, youngest daughter of Peter the Great, on the throne. Under her rule (1741-1762) a national revival took place. In a war with Sweden (1741-1743), Russia gained a portion of Finland. The Empress also joined Austria and France in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) against Prussia. Her nephew and successor, Peter III, was an admirer of King Frederick II of Prussia, and at his accession in 1762 concluded a separate peace with Frederick. Peter was swiftly deposed and murdered in the same year. His wife, a German princess (named Sophie) by birth, ascended the throne as Catherine II; she became known as Catherine the Great.

C.3.

Catherine the Great

Catherine was the first of the successors of Peter the Great to understand and further his policies. With striking success, she carried out ambitious plans for Russian expansion. Her campaigns took two main directions. First, she turned her armies against the Ottoman Empire in order to acquire warm-water Black Sea ports necessary for Russian commerce. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1768 to 1774, Russia acquired territory in the Crimea, and the Tatar Crimea region was annexed to the Russian Empire in 1783. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1787 to 1792 Russia acquired all the territory west to the Dniester River, including the Black Sea port of Ochakov. The second phase of Catherine’s wars dealt with territories in the west; there, as a result of the three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795), Russia gained 468,000 sq km (180,000 sq mi) of land with about 6 million inhabitants. Catherine’s domestic policies echoed the westernization of Peter’s reign. She chose French culture as a guide and spared no expense to fill the St Petersburg court with the cream of European talent; it was after her reign that the city was first called “the Venice of the North”. For a time she appeared to be interested in the liberal theories espoused by such French writers as Voltaire, with whom she corresponded. In 1767 Catherine issued an outline of proposed legal and administrative reforms, particularly in regard to serfs, but they were not carried out because of the opposition of the nobility. Her own opposition was stirred by a Cossack and peasant uprising led by the Zaporozhian Cossack Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachov. The rebellion, the worst of the agrarian uprisings that studded Russian history, was suppressed in 1775; Pugachov was executed and the Zaporozhian Cossacks liquidated. Catherine, instead of relaxing the oppressive serf laws, strengthened them. Such changes did not prevent peasant revolts, which continued sporadically through most of the rest of the imperial era, but they did serve to constrain Russia even more tightly within a social structure that was becoming increasingly outdated and incapable of meeting the challenges and changes of the emerging modern world. After the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, the empress discarded her liberal views entirely.

C.4.

Paul I and Alexander I

Catherine was succeeded in 1796 by her son Paul I. He inaugurated some reforms in the treatment of serfs, limiting their obligatory work for landowners to three days a week. In foreign affairs he joined Austria, Britain, Naples, and the Ottoman Empire in the Second Coalition against France. A despotic and unbalanced ruler, he was assassinated in his palace in 1801 by a conspiracy that was led by the nobility.

His son, Alexander I (1801-1825), had been Catherine’s favourite grandson. Imbued with the liberal policies of her early reign and educated by the Swiss thinker Frédéric César de La Harpe, Alexander began his reign by granting amnesty to political prisoners, projecting a constitution for the empire, and repealing many of his father’s restrictive measures. His advanced domestic policies, however, were soon abandoned because of involvement in foreign wars. In 1805 Russia joined Britain, Austria, Sweden, and Naples in the Third Coalition against Napoleon I. After French armies crushed Prussia in the Battle of Jena on October 14, 1806, and defeated Russia at Friedland on June 14, 1807, Alexander changed sides and allied Russia with France by the Treaty of Tilsit (1807). Under this agreement, which divided Europe into French and Russian spheres of interest, Alexander, in return for helping France against Britain, was allowed freedom of action against Sweden and Turkey. After the Russo-Turkish War of 1806 to 1812, Russia received Bessarabia from Turkey. The Russo-Swedish War of 1808 and 1809 ended with Russian acquisition of the Åland Islands and all of Finland. In 1806, as a result of war with Iran following the Russian annexation of Georgia in 1801, Russia had also acquired Dagestan, Baku, and other areas. Meanwhile, relations with France were deteriorating in the face of Napoleon’s ambition to control all of Europe and Alexander’s desire to extend Russian territory to Constantinople; the problems took a personal turn when Alexander refused Napoleon the hand of his sister. On June 24, 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia with 600,000 troops. Initially his efforts to conquer Russia appeared successful, culminating in the Battle of Borodino on September 7, 1812. Ultimately, however, the campaign was a disaster for the French emperor. The Russian generals, led by General Kutuzov, opting to “lose Moscow and save the army”, retreated to regroup their forces and plan the engage-and-avoid campaign that was to prove Napoleon’s downfall. His troops entered Moscow on September 14, but the city was deserted and much of it had been burned by the Russians. Napoleon’s repeated requests for negotiations were ignored, and, increasingly starved of supplies and an enemy to engage, his forces began to disintegrate into bands of marauders as discipline collapsed. On October 19, Napoleon abandoned Moscow and the French were forced to fall back in a retreat which quickly became a rout. Exposed to hunger, cold, and Kutuzov’s constant guerrilla attacks in a country devastated by the Russian “scorched-earth” policy only 30,000 French troops made it back across the ice of the Berezina River, the western border of Russia. After the French retreat from Moscow, Alexander, who entered Paris on March 14, 1814, at the head of the Russian army, became a central figure in the alliance that accomplished the overthrow of Napoleon. In 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, most of the duchy of Warsaw was awarded to Russia.

Although the last decade of Alexander’s reign was marked by reaction and repressive measures, closer intellectual intercourse between Western Europe and Russia resulted in the radicalization of many members of the Russian intelligentsia, particularly students, the upper middle class, and the younger landed nobility. Exposed to the economic, social, and political changes in the rest of Europe, they increasingly viewed Russia as a despotic state with an intricate, corrupt bureaucracy, that was little concerned with the oppressed masses. They began to form secret political societies demanding, among other things, the abolition of serfdom. The revolutionary tradition that culminated in the Russian Revolution of 1917 was thus initiated.

C.5.

Nicholas I

After Alexander’s sudden death in 1825 without issue, the throne passed to his youngest brother, Nicholas I. Taking advantage of some uncertainty regarding the succession, a group of young officers and nobles organized on December 14, 1825, a revolt in an effort to form a constitutional monarchy, or even a republic. Nicholas suppressed the revolt within hours, and ordered the immediate execution of the leaders of the Decembrists, as the conspirators became known; another 120 were exiled to Siberia. The conspiracy confirmed Nicholas’s distrust of liberalism, and he reacted by decreeing further reactionary measures, including a new secret police to compel complete obedience to the emperor, strict censorship of all publications, and removal of all material regarded as politically dangerous from school texts and curricula. The revolutionary fervour that gripped western Europe in 1848, was also felt in Russia. Another revolutionary secret society, known as the Petrashevists, was formed. The young Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a member of this group, which advocated emancipation of the serfs though an uprising. The secret police uncovered their activities, and they were arrested and sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia, including Dostoyevsky. Afterwards Nicholas began a vigorous campaign against liberal ideas in education and in intellectual circles in general. University chairs of history and philosophy were abolished as potentially dangerous, and student bodies were reduced to 300 in each university. Despite such repressions, the first half of the 19th century was a period of considerable artistic, literary, and scientific achievement.

Nicholas made some efforts to expand the empire. This expansion took three directions: south-west towards the Mediterranean, involving interference in the Balkan provinces of Turkey; south into the Caucasus and Central Asia; and east to the Pacific Ocean. A war with Iran began in 1826 and ended two years later with the Russian acquisition of part of Armenia, including the strategic city of Yerevan. At the same time Nicholas espoused the cause of the Greek revolutionaries, and a Russian fleet joined the British and French vessels that destroyed the Turkish fleet in the Battle of Navarino on October 20, 1827. In the resulting Russo-Turkish War of 1828 and 1829, Turkey was defeated. The Treaty of Adrianople (September 14, 1829) gave Russia suzerainty over the peoples of the Caucasus and the Emperor a protectorate over Moldavia and Walachia, with rights of interference.

A major Polish revolt against Russian rule began in 1830. Polish nationalists expelled their Russian governor and organized a provisional government. Russian troops forced the capitulation of the rebel leaders the following year. As a result, scarcely any autonomy was left to Poland.

Increasing Russian power in the Middle East was regarded as a threat by other European powers, particularly after Russian forces appeared in the Dardanelles by agreement with Turkey in 1833. Britain, France, Prussia, and Austria formed a bloc to circumvent Russian plans for eventual mastery of Constantinople. In 1853, after Nicholas invaded the Danubian principalities, Turkey declared war on Russia. In the Crimean War (1853-1856) that followed, Russia was faced by British, French, and Sardinian, as well as Turkish, troops and was utterly defeated.

C.6.

Alexander II

Nicholas died in 1855, and peace was concluded a year later by his son, Alexander II. Russia was compelled to relinquish Kars and part of Bessarabia, the Black Sea was neutralized, and the Russian protectorate over the Danubian principalities was abolished. This setback in the south-west, however, had little effect on Russia’s continuing advance to the Pacific Ocean and towards the Persian Gulf. Russia had completed the conquest of Siberia in the 1650s, and subsequently the search for new lands further east began in earnest. Initially led by explorers like Ivan Moskvilin and Vasily Poyarkov, Semyon Dezhnev, and Yerofey Khabarov, it was followed by the start of settlement. The Kamatchka peninsula had been conquered at the end of the 17th century. In 1850, following the establishment of the first settlements on Kamatchka in the previous century, a Russian settlement was established on the estuary of the Amur River. The northern half of the island of Sakhalin was occupied in 1855. Three years later the entire Amur region and the coast south to the city of Vladivostok (founded in 1860) was annexed. In Central Asia the empire was extended south almost to the border of India, with the annexations of Toshkent (1865), Bokhara (1866), Samarqand (1868), Khiva (1873), and Kokand (1876). Merv (now Mary) was annexed in 1884, three years after Alexander’s death.

Domestically, Alexander’s early reign was an era of reform, made necessary by the debacle of the Crimean War, which had exposed the archaic nature of Russia’s political and social institutions. In 1861 he decreed the emancipation of the serfs. This necessitated a reform of local government, and in 1864 zemstvos, or elected district assemblies, were introduced in European Russia to deal with local issues such as education, public welfare, agricultural development, road-building, and health services. Each zemstvo was elected indirectly by three separate electoral colleges: nobility, townsmen, and peasantry. The nobility inevitably dominated, and in 1890 the right of peasant election was virtually abolished. Zemstvos were subsequently set up in other areas, but not in the frontier regions or the main towns (which had their own municipal councils from 1870). With no central representative parliament before 1805, the zemstvos played an important role in the formation of the political intelligentsia; many deputies and officials held radical views.

The judicial system was also revised and trial by jury instituted for serious criminal offences. Other changes included the encouragement of secondary education and university reform, and changes in army administration and the substitution of conscription for an inequitable forced levy. The emperor refused, however, to countenance a constitution or the organization of a representative national assembly. Revolutionary movements increased and adopted definite policies and aims. One prominent group advocated nihilism, which aimed to tear down the basis of the existing society and build a new (but indeterminate) one on its ruins. The narodniki, a populist movement, worked for a peasant uprising. Revolutionaries were also prominent in Poland, and in 1863 the Poles rose in a second major rebellion against Russia. After it was quelled, Poland was deprived of the last vestiges of its autonomy and was extensively Russified. Such developments, combined with an assassination attempt in 1866, led Alexander to give way to reactionary elements in the court, and return to the despotism of the past.

Russia resumed its expansionist policies during the 1870s. The overthrow of Napoleon III, a principal opponent of Russian interference in the Balkans, enabled Russia to widen its sphere of influence there. When Serbia and Montenegro revolted against Turkey in 1876, Russia intervened on their behalf. After the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and 1878, Alexander obtained major concessions from Turkey, but these were largely negated by a conference of the European powers at Berlin, fearful of Russian domination of the Dardanelles.

D.

The End of the Empire

The essential failure of the war combined with Alexander’s growing despotism increased popular discontent with the government. A secret terrorist group, the Narodnaya Volya (“The People’s Will”), in 1879 condemned Alexander to death for failing to summon a constituent assembly. After several failed attempts they finally succeeded on March 13, 1881, when Alexander was blown up by a bomb thrown by a Polish student.

Ironically, Alexander had, unknown to the public, given his consent finally to limited constitutional reform only that morning. These proposals were abandoned on his death by his son, Alexander III, who reacted to the assassination by instituting rigid censorship and police supervision of intellectual activities. The power of the zemstvos was drastically curbed, and Russification programmes were forced upon the many racial minorities within the empire. The oppression of Jews was particularly severe. They were forced to live in certain areas, not permitted to enter specific professions, and killed in great numbers (see Pogrom).

Political discontent was driven underground and revolutionary propaganda was eagerly accepted by Russian factory workers. The theories of Karl Marx found many supporters; the first Russian Marxist group was formed in St Petersburg in 1883. An intensified programme of industrialization had resulted in a great increase in the number of industrial workers. Such cities as St Petersburg and Moscow became notorious for the miserable working and living conditions of factory labourers.

In the last years of his reign, Alexander encouraged the development of Russia’s far eastern territories, authorizing construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. During this period the close relations with Germany and Austro-Hungary developed by his father—the Dreikaiserbund (“League of the Three Emperors”) collapsed in the face of Alexander’s concerns over Germany’s expansionist policies. In 1894 he concluded a secret military alliance, the Dual, or Franco-Russian, Alliance, with France.

Nicholas II, eldest son of Alexander III, ascended the throne in 1894. Although well intentioned, he was a weak ruler, out of touch with his people, easily dominated by others and a firm believer in the autocratic principles taught him by his father. His wife, Princess Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, a granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria, became a fanatical believer in the Russian autocratic tradition and encouraged Nicholas to reject all reform proposals. She bore him four daughters and a son, Alexis, who suffered from haemophilia, which was carried in Queen Victoria’s line. In their vain attempts to effect a cure for him, Nicholas and Alexandra became prey to quacks and religious fanatics, notably the Siberian starets (holy man) Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin.

Autocracy, oppression, and police control increased under Nicholas. They were met by an upsurge of terrorist acts. From outside Russia political leaders, including notably Vladimir Ilich Lenin, directed the Socialist movement. The Social Democratic Labour Party was formed in 1898. In 1903 it split over policy into two factions: the Mensheviks (moderates) led by Julius Cedarbaum, who took the conspiratorial name of Martov; and the Bolsheviks (the revolutionary faction) led by Lenin. Although outwardly reunited in 1906, the two groups remained fundamentally deeply divided. In foreign affairs, Russia’s expanding interests in Dongbei clashed head on with those of the Japanese Empire. The resulting friction led to a Japanese attack on February 8, 1904.

D.1.

The Revolution of 1905

Needing popular support for the prosecution of the war with Japan, the government permitted a congress of zemstvos to meet in St Petersburg in November 1904. When the demands of the congress for reform went unheeded by the government, they were adopted by Socialist groups. A demonstration was called by students and labour leaders. On January 22, 1905, thousands of people led by Georgy Apollonovich Gapon, a revolutionary priest, marched to the Winter Palace carrying icons and chanting “God save the tsar”. Their aim was to present a petition to Nicholas asking for an amnesty for political prisoners, the summoning of a constituent assembly, and an eight-hour working day. Nicholas was not in residence and the marchers were fired on by imperial troops. Hundreds were killed and wounded, and the event has become known in Russian history as Bloody Sunday.

The massacre precipitated a series of events that became known as the Revolution of 1905. Strikes and riots protesting against the killings began throughout the industrialized sections of Russia. The rush of events, combined with continued disaster in the war against Japan, influenced the government to make concessions. The Emperor promised a limited consultative parliament, called the State Duma, and issued decrees granting freedom of worship to Old Believers (April 29) and more liberty for Poland (May 16). These concessions were considered totally inadequate and the agitation for reform intensified. There were strikes, peasant revolts, and assassinations. Soldiers and sailors mutinied, most famously on the Battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea fleet. On October 14, a soviet, or council of workers’ delegates, was formed at St Petersburg to lead a general strike. The strike, from 20 to 30 October, paralysed European Russia, and was accompanied by uprisings of nationalist groups, peasant unrest, and turmoil throughout the empire. To this was added the complete defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. On October 30 the Tsar yielded and agreed to establish a constitution and a legislative Duma. For the first time a prime minister was appointed, initially Sergey Witte, who as minister both of finance and communications during the 1880s and 1890s was a key figure in the increasing industrialization of Russia. He was quickly replaced, however, by Pyotr Stolypin, who had attracted Nicholas’s attention by his ferocious suppression of uprisings in Saratov province during 1905. The “October Manifesto” split the revolutionaries. Many of the Mensheviks favoured participation in the Duma. The Bolsheviks opposed it, and the St Petersburg Soviet continued resistance until their arrest in December brought about a violent workers’ rebellion in Moscow, which was brutally quelled by army troops. Order was restored by equally drastic methods in the countryside. By early 1906, the government was again in control.

The first Duma was elected on a broad suffrage in the spring of 1906 and sat from May 10 to July 21. Before the meeting, however, the government had announced the Fundamental Laws, which reserved the prerogative to legislate by decree to the Emperor. They also limited the Duma’s financial powers. As a result the session was occupied with a campaign for recognition of rights and ended in deadlock. A second Duma met from March 5 to June 16, 1907. It was even more radical, and on its dissolution, a new electoral law increased the representative weight of the middle classes at the expense of workers and peasants. The revolutionary movement again began to mount. It was met by ruthless repression, directed by Stolypin and targeted particularly against minorities. Meanwhile, with the conservative middle classes now the dominant influence, the third Duma sat from the end of 1907 to 1912, and enacted various moderate reform measures. The fourth Duma (1912-1916) was less effective, mainly due to the outbreak of World War I; in November 1916, however, it gave Nicholas clear warning of impending revolution without fundamental changes in the regime.

D.2.

World War I

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 put a temporary halt to the revolutionary activities of the radicals. The war was directly precipitated when Russia refused to stand aside while Austria invaded Serbia after the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The fourth Duma, then in session, rallied popular support to the government.

By the end of 1914 severe reverses had been inflicted on the Russian army, notably in East Prussia. The reverses increased in 1915 and, except for temporary victories, the defeat began to assume the proportions of the Crimean and Japanese disasters. By the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the country had suffered 5.5 million casualties. Lack of supplies and transport, and the inefficiency of military leaders, further demoralized the troops. Desertions mounted, and the war became unpopular throughout Russia, where the civilian population faced serious food shortages. Repression and corruption in the government continued, and the country’s problems were exacerbated by the petty feuds that increasingly divided it. In the last 12 months of Nicholas’s rule there were four different prime ministers, three war ministers, and three foreign ministers. The emperor was dominated by his German-born wife, Alexandra, who was distrusted by the Russians and who was largely under the control of Rasputin. Rasputin was rumoured to have become the chief influence in the empire, controlling even military decisions. His presence at court was so resented, not least as a danger to the survival of the monarchy, that in December 1916, a group of aristocrats, including members of the imperial family, murdered him. Revolutionary agitation increased based round two main groups: the liberal intelligentsia, who believed that Russia could still win the war and be transformed into a democratic republic; and the Bolsheviks, who believed the war was already lost and wanted to carry out a complete political, economic, and social transformation of Russia. The first group led the February Revolution; the second, the October Revolution (dated on the Julian calendar). In February 1917, riots began in St Petersburg (renamed Petrograd in 1914). When troops were ordered to fire upon the rioters, they joined them instead. Demands for changes in the government finally resulted in the abdication of Nicholas II and his son on March 15, leaving the administration to a provisional government initially headed by Prince Lvov, and from July by Aleksandr Kerensky. The abdications ended the Russian Empire.

The provisional government, which favoured the establishment of a republican democracy, continued to prosecute the war. However, Kerensky’s attempts to mount a major offensive in the summer of 1917 were bitterly resented by ordinary Russians dreading another winter of war, and hampered by conflict with the Petrograd Soviet, which had been revived earlier in the year. After ten years of forced exile, Lenin returned to Petrograd to plan the Bolshevik takeover. On October 25, taking advantage of splits in the Kerensky government, he gave the command that launched the October Revolution. Ten days later troops of revolutionary forces, the Red Army, stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd and Bolsheviks took control of the state. Lenin then changed the name “Bolshevik” to “Communist”, and on November 7, 1917 (25 October in the Julian calendar), the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) was proclaimed as the territorial successor of the Russian Empire. In 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established, comprising the territory of the former Russian Empire, less the newly independent Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; the RSFSR, with re-drawn boundaries, became one of 15 constituent republics of the USSR.

E.

Russian Revolution and the Soviet Era

For detailed information about the Russian Revolution, see Russian Revolution. For the history of the territory of the former Russian Empire after the Russian Revolution and before the independence of the Russian Federation on December 25, in 1991, see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

F.

Post-Soviet Russia

Shortly after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, a power struggle emerged between conservative and reformist forces in Russia. President Boris Yeltsin, who was elected in June 1991 by popular vote, originally was granted sweeping powers by the Congress of People’s Deputies (CPD), one of the two legislative bodies that existed under the 1978 constitution. Yeltsin used his powers to initiate a programme of sweeping economic reform and to establish a network of regional appointees in order to bypass local legislatures dominated by neo-Communists. Conservatives, led by Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov, a former Yeltsin ally, sought to reduce Yeltsin’s powers after he launched a campaign of radical economic reform in early 1992. At a meeting of the Congress of People’s Deputies (CPD) in December 1992, the acting prime minister Yegor Gaidar (1992), the chief architect of the government’s plan for economic reform, was replaced by Viktor Chernomyrdin, a long-time member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Minister of the Gas Industry of the former USSR. The CPD also rescinded several powers granted to Yeltsin, including control over local administrators. That same month the Constitutional Court limited Yeltsin’s ban on the CPSU and the Russian Communist Party to the national organization, effectively legalizing the latter in Russia. Yeltsin protested at the reduction of his powers, and an agreement was reached with the CPD at the end of 1992 to hold a popular referendum on a new constitution. Conservatives in local and national legislative bodies resisted the organization of a national referendum, however, prompting Yeltsin to declare emergency presidential rule on March 20, 1993. Yeltsin’s announcement of emergency rule was condemned by the Constitutional Court Chairman Valeriy Zorkin, Khasbulatov, Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoy, and others. Both sides subsequently modified their positions: Yeltsin never formally issued a decree on emergency rule, and conservatives allowed the referendum to take place on April 25, 1993.

Yeltsin scored a resounding victory at the polls, but the referendum failed to resolve the power struggle. In September 1993 Yeltsin removed Rutskoy as vice-president on charges of corruption, an action opposed by the parliament. In the same month Yeltsin issued a decree dissolving parliament, due to the resistance of conservative deputies to the work of the Constituent Assembly. The parliament responded by denouncing Yeltsin’s actions as unconstitutional and declaring Rutskoy as president. About 100 deputies and several hundred armed supporters, led by Khasbulatov and Rutskoy, occupied the parliament building, also known as the White House, and refused to disband. A tense stalemate between government and rebel forces lasted several days. It was broken when rebel supporters staged an attack on the mayor’s office and a television centre. The government responded by shelling the parliament building and arresting the occupiers. More than 140 people died in the rebellion and its dispersal by government forces. On October 4, 1993, Rutskoy and Khasbulatov were taken prisoner and charged with inciting mass disorder.

F.1.

Yeltsin’s Presidential Rule

Yeltsin’s victory over conservative forces was short-lived, however. The December 1993 elections gave an unexpected boost to the ultra-nationalist and Communist parties, especially the Liberal Democratic Party, led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky. In February 1994 the newly elected State Duma cleared Rutskoy, Khasbulatov, and others of charges relating to the October 1993 uprising, and it granted amnesty to the organizers of the August 1991 coup against the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Yeltsin responded to the gains made by ultra-conservatives by declaring his willingness to run for a second term, in order to keep the presidency out of the hands of reactionaries.

Throughout 1994 reformers were turning away from a state that was now in the hands of conservative managers, even as Yeltsin reiterated the democrats’ slogans of marketization and privatization with one voice while with another trying to present himself as the defender of Russia’s national interest, warning the West not to try to bring Eastern Europe into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and negotiating a place for Russia at the Bosnian peace table. Yeltsin recognized that public opinion was easily aroused by threats of discrimination against the 25 million Russians who, after the demise of the Soviet Union, found themselves living in the former Soviet republics, the so-called “near-abroad”, where some communities did indeed endure hardship. He saw that strong gestures and actions to protect them might earn his beleaguered regime credit. How to balance such legitimate aims with the rabble-rousing potential of Zhirinovsky’s posturing on the same issues was Yeltsin’s dilemma.

The fear, repeatedly expressed, that failure to achieve political harmony in Moscow would lead to civil war elsewhere became a reality in 1994, when Russian forces invaded the breakaway republic of Chechnya in the Caucasus. This tiny part of the Russian Federation had proclaimed itself independent in 1991, at a time when virtually every part of the former Soviet Union was doing so. In keeping with the spirit of the new democracy, and preoccupied with problems closer to home, the government at first made no move to bring the errant Chechens back into the fold. (During the early 1990s Chechens outstripped the reputation of all other ethnic groups as mafia bosses and strong-arm gangsters in Moscow, and feeling against them was strong among Russians.) Chechnya, however, was not only a dangerous precedent for other potential separatists: it was also an oil source and controlled the oil pipeline from Central Asia and the Caspian Sea to Russia. The government decided to bring the Chechens to heel by means of a “short, sharp operation”.

The question quickly arose of whether Yeltsin was in control of his own policy and indeed of his armed forces. It was even unclear whether he had given the order to invade, or whether other forces had taken the decision for him. In either case, the answer would be alarming, for loss of control by a reform-minded leader could only mean the rise to power of men whose goals were anti-democratic.

Yeltsin’s advice was by now coming from at least two sources: his liberal advisers of the perestroika period who wanted to keep him on the path of reform and democratic methods, and another group led chiefly by senior military figures on the 13-member Security Council—a body he had created to circumvent a fractious Duma—who wanted him to reassert Russia’s authority. He was thought above all to be influenced by an eminence grise, former KGB major-general Aleksandr Korzhakov, who had command of 30,000 troops whose sole purpose was “to protect the president’s interests”.

The Chechen crisis was a severe test of the new regime’s will. When senior Russian officers refused to attack Chechen civilians, and untrained, ill-equipped conscripts complained to TV crews that they did not know why they had been sent to Chechnya, it became clear that the line of command was seriously flawed. As pictures of the war were shown nightly on Russian television, a powerful anti-war public mood arose: mothers of young soldiers held protest meetings on the streets and some even travelled to Chechnya to find their sons and take them home. The Russian government responded by intensifying the fighting, while proclaiming the war would be ended by political means. The war was still going on, however, despite the government’s assertions to the contrary, when United States president Bill Clinton and other Western leaders attended Victory Day jubilee celebrations in Moscow in May 1995.

In April 1995 a standby loan of US$6.8 billion to Russia was agreed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As the national economies of the former Soviet republics continued to flounder, and their newly invented currencies became worthless compared even to the Russian rouble, economic ties, notably between Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, increased bilaterally, and in May 1995 Belarus signed a treaty of economic union with Russia. Efforts to create a “Slavonic union” between Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus were frustrated by the wrangle between Russia and Ukraine over control of the Black Sea Fleet and sovereignty over Crimea, where the population was overwhelmingly Russian.

By the summer of 1995, Yeltsin’s personal standing and that of his administration had sunk to the point where it was confidently expected that his supporters would be defeated in the December elections—should he permit them to take place—and that he would be an unlikely victor in the presidential election due in 1996. His difficulties were compounded when Chechen fighters raided the town of Budyonnovsk inside Russia, itself, on June 14, killing more than 140 people and taking more than 1,000 women and children hostage. The prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, negotiated a peaceful end to the hostage drama, winning much praise for his calmness and decisiveness. The events also discredited the Security Council, and increased public disenchantment with nationalistic military adventures. Yeltsin himself suffered what was reported as a mild heart attack in July; but the relatively muted public reaction suggested growing political and economic stability.

F.2.

Elections and Economic Reform

A peace agreement between the Russian government and Chechen rebels was signed in July 1995, without resolving the actual political status of the region, and proved to be short-lived. In December national elections gave the revived Communist Party 157 seats out of 450 in the Duma, with the radical nationalist Liberal Democratic Party securing a further 51. Yeltsin responded by dismissing several free-market reformers from his Cabinet in January 1996, while other prominent liberals resigned in protest at his policies. In March 1996 the Duma passed a resolution effectively revoking the 1991 formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States: Yeltsin instantly dismissed it as invalid, while it was condemned by the majority of CIS members. A new IMF three-year credit package of more than US$10 billion was also agreed in March, despite evident slowing of state privatization, as Yeltsin announced a unilateral ceasefire in Chechnya.

Yeltsin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov all entered their candidacies for the 1996 presidential elections in April, while Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin stood aside, as the death of the Chechen separatist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev was announced in Chechnya. The first round of presidential polling in June was held against a background of economic resurgence combined with widespread concern over deteriorating law and order, and nostalgia for Russia’s Soviet-era superpower predominance. Yeltsin finished the June polls with a narrow lead over Zyuganov, while Gorbachev and the maverick Zhirinovsky were eliminated from the contest, which underlined the pivotal role of the third-placed candidate, General Aleksandr Lebed. Immediately afterwards, Yeltsin appointed Lebed to a new post of national security adviser, with responsibility for security and law and order: Lebed promptly sacked Yeltsin’s defence minister and close ally Pavel Grachev, widely implicated in the 1994 fiasco in Chechnya, with this and other sackings blamed on a plot to destabilize the second round of polling. Yeltsin duly scored a convincing win in the second round of presidential voting in July 1996, with over 50 per cent of the poll and a clear lead of more than 10 per cent over his Communist rival Zyuganov.

In his new position as national security adviser, Lebed played a central role in the establishment of a final peace accord with the Chechen rebels. Following a major assault on Groznyy by the rebels in August 1996, he negotiated a gradual withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya. In addition, the peace accord dictated that the Moscow-installed government in Groznyy should be removed and a new government for the republic elected. Also, in exchange for Russian withdrawal, it was agreed that a final decision on Chechnya’s political status would be postponed for five years. The withdrawal of Russian troops was finally completed on January 6, 1997, ahead of schedule and in the run-up to elections for a new Chechen government and president, held on January 27. Victor in the presidential elections was Aslan Maskhadov, the military leader primarily responsible, with Lebed, for negotiating the peace accord. He immediately promised to pursue the issue of Chechen independence from Russia, “using only political means”. The war had left many tens of thousands of civilians dead and much of the republic’s housing and industrial capacity destroyed.

Yeltsin saw his victory in the 1996 presidential elections as a clear mandate for the continuation of the reform programme. He reorganized his Cabinet, bringing in new reformers as well as retaining loyalists such as Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and Chief of Staff Anatoly Chubais in key positions. Lebed, however, who had gained widespread popularity as a “man of the people” rather than a party politician, continued to criticize government actions, especially aspects of the reform programme. In October he was sacked as national security adviser, and went on in December to launch a new political party, the Russian Popular Republican Party.

Lebed had also called for Yeltsin to hand over the presidency, at least temporarily, saying that his illness had left him unable to carry out his duties properly, and the country effectively leaderless. Since his election, Yeltsin, weakened by the rigours of campaigning had largely vanished from the public eye. Based in a sanatorium preparing for a quintuple heart bypass operation, he came to rely heavily upon his daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, who rapidly became one of the most influential figures in the administration. Together with Chubais, she controlled access to the visibly ailing president, who underwent the operation in November. Yeltsin’s return to full-time duties was delayed by a bout of pneumonia, which heightened doubts concerning his future. A bid in early February 1997 by the Communist bloc in the State Duma to oust him from office on health grounds failed through lack of support and procedural errors. Yeltsin finally returned to full-time duties at the end of February.

His effective eight-month absence from office, however, had been felt both in the domestic and foreign affairs fields. At home, the problems of the Russian Federation’s governability were reaching critical proportions centred on the tax collection problems that were hindering the government’s ability to implement policies and undermining even more its popularity with an electorate increasingly angry with the growing backlog of unpaid wages and pensions. Another key problem was the relationship between the federal government and the 89 territorial regions of the federation, especially the republics. The legacy of Soviet economic policy severely affected the regions. Many were heavily reliant in terms of both employment and income on large, obsolescent, and inefficient large-scale enterprises that had little chance of survival in the very different economy of the new Russia without large-scale subsidies, which the central government could no longer afford to make. Yeltsin tried to counter growing rumbles of discontent in the regions by relieving many of their tax obligations to the central coffers. This, however, tended only to worsen the central government’s financial situation without addressing the growing political instability in many regions.

Yeltsin used his annual state-of the-nation address, delivered to both houses of parliament in March 1997, to demonstrate that he was back in full control. Vowing to tackle corruption and the economy, he promised sweeping changes to the government, which he denounced for failing the needs of the people. He appointed Chubais, a dedicated reformer, as a first deputy prime minister and ordered Chernomyrdin to implement a reshuffle of the Cabinet within a week. The move was seen as a signal that the economic reform programme, which had largely stagnated during 1996 as a result of the elections and Yeltsin’s illness, was to be resumed. Although well received by Western observers and Russian “Westernizers”, Chubais’ appointment was generally unpopular domestically. The seven newcomers to Chernomyrdin’s 27-member government included mostly reformers and relatively young men—notably 37-year-old Boris Nemtsov, reform-minded governor of Nizhniy Novgorod oblast, who became the other first deputy prime minister, beside Chubais. The latter was given overall responsibility for economic reform, and also became finance minister; Alexei Kudrin, an ally of Chubais, was appointed first deputy finance minister. In addition, in a move to streamline the government, the ministries of industry, defence industries, and construction were abolished, as were several of the state committees. A number of conservative ministers lost their jobs or were demoted. Conservative interior minister Anatoly Kulikov, foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov, and defence minister Igor Rodionov retained their posts. Rodionov was sacked in May by Yeltsin, however, along with Viktor Samsonov, chief of general staff, for failing to carry out planned cutbacks in and reform of the armed forces. Rodionov was replaced by Igor Sergeyev, head of Russia’s nuclear missile force.

The last changes in the Cabinet had to be rushed through because of plans by the trade unions to organize a nationwide protest, involving picketing, rallies, and marches, against wage and pension arrears totalling almost US$9 billion. Some 20 million people were expected to participate, including around 7 million Russians already on strike over this and related issues. On the eve of the strike, Chernomyrdin and the new economic team headed by Chubais and Nemtsov promised that state and private employers would pay up to US$2 billion in back wages and pensions by the end of March. The remaining back pensions would be cleared by the end of June, debts to teachers by May, and other government debts by the autumn. The announcement proved partly effective in that the actual numbers participating in the protests were much lower than 20 million, although probably not as low as the 2 million official figure.

It was unclear as to where the finances for the payments would come from, particularly given the drastic cuts in government spending announced by Chernomyrdin in May, along with measures to squeeze some of the worst tax defaulters, such as the gas giant Gazprom. The cuts, already being implemented, were a response to the tax collection shortfalls, estimated at one third of tax revenues in the first quarter of 1997. The proposals were rejected by anti-government groups in the Duma, headed by the Communists, many of whom called for the government to increase the money supply in order to provide companies and the government with the cash to pay the backlog of bills, wages, and pensions. It was not likely, however, that deputies would push the issue to a vote of confidence, and this was one area where the government was expected to refuse to compromise. One of the few successful areas in the reform programme since 1995 was the cutback in inflation and the stabilization in the value of the rouble as a result of stringent controls over money supply. By mid-1997 the rate of inflation had remained below 3 per cent a month for more than 15 months, while the rouble had traded within a predictable range for more than a year, attracting foreign capital at a rate unseen for several years.

On his return to full-time work Yeltsin also attempted to resume firm control over Russia’s foreign policy, particularly with regard to NATO. During his illness Russian objections to proposed extensions of NATO to include former Eastern bloc countries—notably Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary—and eventually former-RSFSR member republics, such as the Baltic states, had become particularly strident. More extreme nationalists were predicting that an expanded NATO alliance would be followed by an invasion of Russia. Although Yeltsin continued to express public concern about the implications for Russia of an expanded NATO, he also went ahead with negotiations that, on May 27, led to the signing of an agreement between the two sides. Under the Founding Act for NATO-Russia, signed by Yeltsin in Paris, NATO formally agreed to give Russia a voice in the alliance and made it a member of a new NATO council to set European security policy without, however, the right to veto. In the run-up to the agreement NATO strengthened previous assurances that no NATO nuclear weapons would be deployed within the territories of new Eastern European members.

In July 1997 the president announced a cut in Russia’s armed forces by some 500,000 personnel, to 1.2 million, by the end of 1998; this move prompted opposition from military sympathizers in the Duma. In a separate decree, however, he promised to settle outstanding wage arrears in the armed forces, which had long been a cause of resentment in the ranks. The privatization auction of the Norilsk Nickel mining group provoked a further financial scandal in August, and is thought to have resulted in the replacement of Alfred Kokh, the deputy prime minister and the chairman of the committee responsible for supervising the privatization programme. Russia joined the Paris Club of creditor countries in September, and under the terms of the agreement would be able to recoup some of the US$140 billion that it was owed. An agreement on debt restructuring was also signed with the London Club of creditor nations in October, to deal with debts assumed by Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Also in October, Russia ended two years of controversy with De Beers, when it rejoined the diamond cartel after operating independently since 1995.

The execution, in early September of two convicted murderers and a subsequent double execution in Chechnya under Shari’ah law, attracted censure from the Russian authorities. President Yeltsin approved a controversial law dealing with religious freedom, which restricted the denominations allowed to function freely to those religions that had existed continuously and enjoyed legal status in Russia for 15 years. There was renewed concern over Yeltsin’s health in December, but a connection with his previous heart problems was denied. Also in December the State Duma accepted the draft budget for 1998, after President Yeltsin had warned of the imminent collapse of the currency if the budget was rejected. In late March 1998 Yeltsin sacked Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and his entire government, and appointed the relatively unknown 35-year-old Sergei Kiriyenko, formerly of the energy ministry. A month-long test of wills between Yeltsin and the Duma ensued, until the Duma capitulated in April and confirmed the appointment.

After just a few months in office, Kiriyenko was dismissed as premier, and Viktor Chernomyrdin reappointed in his place by Yeltsin. The Duma twice rejected Chernomyrdin, but by September had accepted Yeltsin's compromise candidate, Yevgeny Primakov, as prime minister; the appointment was regarded by many observers as a major political defeat for the president. Yeltsin surprised even regular Kremlin observers, when he dismissed four of his senior advisers in December, in a move that was interpreted as an attempt to bolster his authority. Yeltsin's deteriorating health continued to give cause for concern when he was admitted to hospital with an acute stomach ulcer, in January 1999. The initiation of air strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by NATO forces in late March resulted in Yeltsin ordering an end to cooperation with NATO, and calls in the Duma for the despatch of arms and volunteers to the region. Tensions were heightened by the visit of Prime Minister Primakov to Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade, in late March. Former prime minister Chernomyrdin attempted to find a solution to the conflict in the Balkans, and his rounds of shuttle-diplomacy involving Milošević, European leaders and President Clinton's envoy eventually paved the path for the acceptance of peace terms in early June. However, Chernomyrdin was later accused by deputies in the Duma of betraying Russia's interests and of giving too much to the West.

In April the IMF announced an agreement to resume lending to Russia. The IMF had frozen cooperation with Russia in August 1998 after Russia defaulted on its foreign debt and devalued the rouble. The new agreement would provide Russia with approximately US$4,500 million over 18 months. In May 1999 Yeltsin suddenly sacked Primakov and his Cabinet, accusing the premier of acting too slowly in addressing the country’s economic ills. Many analysts said Yeltsin dismissed Primakov because the president was concerned about the former prime minister's growing power, political independence, and popularity. It came at a time when Yeltsin’s increasingly difficult relations with the Duma had led to an attempt to impeach the president on charges that included undermining the Russian military, starting the disastrous war in Chechnya, and causing widespread hardship by destroying Russia's economy. The impeachment effort failed and the Duma backed Yeltsin’s choice to replace Primakov, the Russian interior minister Sergei Stepashin, in the first ballot. Stepashin announced that his first priority would be to push through reforms of Russia's tax and banking systems.

When it became apparent that the West had not considered the position of the Russians in the policing of the peace deal achieved by Chernomyrdin, Russian troops embarrassed NATO forces in Kosovo when they became the first of the peacekeeping forces to reach the province's capital Priština, taking control of the airport in June. Russian officials later claimed the early movement of troops had been in error when a deal was finally reached in July as to the position of the Russians in the peacekeeping force.

The last full-time crew of the space station Mir landed in Kazakhstan in August marking the end of an era in space exploration. The 13-year-old space installation, which has made over 77,000 orbits round the Earth, hosted more than 100 cosmonauts, and experienced some 1,600 breakdowns, was only built to last 5 years. It gained notoriety in its last years for a series of dramatic incidents experienced by residents of the ageing craft. Russia could no longer fund the orbiting laboratory and the demise of Mir has brought to an end Russia's independent role at the forefront of space exploration; the country committed its resources to the building of the international space station, a project led by the United States. Mir’s mission was eventually terminated and the remains of the station brought down to Earth in March 2001.

Earlier, in August 1999, Yeltsin had again abruptly dismissed his prime minister and Cabinet. While he gave no reason for his action, it had become clear that Yeltsin believed Stepashin would not be an effective candidate as his successor in the presidential elections due in 2000: the government shake-up came just days after the formation of a new political alliance called Fatherland-All Russia between Russian regional governors and Yuri Luzhkov, the popular mayor of Moscow, which was also joined by Yevgeny Primakov. As Stepashin’s successor Yeltsin nominated the head of the Federal Security Board and former KGB spy Vladimir Putin. Putin immediately had to deal with the incursion of Islamic rebels from Chechnya into Dagestan—tensions had been rising again in the area since the ending of the last war in Chechnya in 1996. A wave of terrorist bombings that struck three Russian cities in August and September, killing nearly 300 people and injuring hundreds of others compounded these fears. Putin accused Islamic separatists despite the denial of Chechen leaders and in September Russian warplanes began a campaign of air strikes in Chechen territory, bombing industrial targets near Groznyy and suspected rebel bases throughout Chechnya.

The Russian electorate welcomed this firm action, and this was reflected in the elections for the Duma in December. The new Unity coalition that had been formed in October with the public support of Yeltsin and Putin won 72 seats, second only to the Communists who won 113 seats, down from 152. This backing for the prosecution of the war against Chechnya led to the ground invasion of Chechnya shortly after the election results had been announced.

On December 31, 1999, Boris Yeltsin stunned the world, and wrong-footed his political opponents, by announcing his resignation as president, naming Putin as acting president and nominating him as his favoured successor. It had been expected that Yeltsin would cling on to power until the June 2000 elections, but his resignation brought forward the date of the presidential election to the end of March, ensuring that Putin could take advantage of the wave of popularity he was enjoying as a result of his prosecution of the war.

F.3.

The Putin Era

In the weeks that followed his taking control as acting president, Putin sent out a number of conflicting signals as to his true intentions. It appeared likely that he would continue with the economic reforms of his predecessor; however, commentators in the West were unsure as to the likely style of his government, doubting his commitment to democratic processes, and whether he would look to root out the corruption that was so damaging to the last months of Yeltsin's presidency.

In January Putin fired Tatyana Dyachenko, Yeltsin's daughter and a powerful Kremlin adviser, and seven days later he dismissed Pavel Borodin, controller of the Kremlin's property empire. Both Dyachenko and Borodin had been at the centre of allegations of corruption under investigation by Swiss and Russian authorities. Meanwhile, Putin continued to prosecute the war against Chechnya despite increasing pressure from the West, with both the EU and the IMF threatening to withdraw financial aid to Russia. Groznyy finally fell to the Russian troops after a devastating siege in February, but the war continued in the southern mountains of the breakaway republic. The Russian government came under increasing criticism for alleged atrocities committed in the course of the war and for the treatment of prisoners; these allegations were subsequently investigated by human rights organizations. Just a month before presidential elections, Russia reached an agreement with the London Club of creditors on debt repayments.

In March, Putin claimed a convincing victory in the presidential elections, becoming Russia’s second democratically elected president. He won almost 53 per cent of the vote in the first round, with his nearest challenger, the Communist party leader Gennady Zyuganov, polling 29 per cent. Other possible contenders for the presidency such as former prime ministers Viktor Chernomyrdin and Yevgeny Primakov had dropped out of the race in January in the face of Putin’s overwhelming popularity. An encouraging report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OEDC), published in the same month, stated that Russia had made considerable progress towards the implementation of free market economics and expressed the need for further comprehensive tax and banking reforms.

Before the new government was inaugurated in May, Putin combined his post as prime minister with his function of president-elect. He was formally inaugurated as president on May 7, 2000, and appointed the former first deputy prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, as premier. The new Cabinet was restructured, with four ministries—CIS Affairs, Economics, Science, and Trade—abolished and two new ministries created (Science, Industry, and Technology; and Economics, Development, and Trade). The first major step towards centralization of power came shortly after the presidential inauguration, when Putin signed a decree on new federal districts (“super-regions”), which were superimposed on the country’s 89 constituent republics and regions. Presidential envoys were appointed in each new district to report back to the Kremlin and to supervise the implementation of legislation from Moscow. This effectively reduced local autonomy and powers of local authorities. In total, seven district were established: Central, with Moscow as the capital; North-West (capital St Petersburg); North Caucasus, later renamed the Southern District (capital Rostov-on-Don); Volga (capital Nizhniy Novgorod); Ural (capital Yekaterinburg); and Far Eastern (capital Khabarovsk).

Progress was made in relations with the United States when, during President Bill Clinton’s fifth visit to Moscow, both leaders signed a pact on a joint early warning system, the Centre for Monitoring Missile Launches, and also agreed on the timing and manner of disposing of 34 tonnes each of weapons’ grade plutonium. In June, Putin toured Western Europe to meet heads of state and to gain support for his internal and international policies.

In an effort to bring the situation in Chechnya under control, Putin introduced, in early June, direct presidential rule in the breakaway republic, appointing Mufti Akhmed Kadyrov, a Muslim cleric, to the post of presidential representative. Kadyrov’s appointment proved extremely unpopular with the supporters of the Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov, and tensions continued throughout the year. Internally, Putin attempted to assert control over media and various branches of business, which led to his prolonged conflict with business leaders known as “oligarchs”, in particular with Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, and with the owners of privately owned publishing houses and radio and television stations.

In the summer, the world’s attention was captivated by the sinking of a Russian nuclear submarine, the Kursk, with 118-man crew, which occurred on August 12 during a naval exercise in the Barents Sea. Putin faced severe internal and international criticism and anger for his handling of the tragedy, which left no survivors. Reports from Moscow were indicative of a power struggle over the fate of the Kursk between reformers and hardliners, especially as the Russian side initially refused Western help. Two other major incidents in Moscow during the same months further highlighted the level of social chaos on one hand, and the deteriorating state of the infrastructure on the other. A bomb explosion in a busy underpass in the centre of Moscow killed 12 people on August 8, and on August 27 the Ostankino television tower, the tallest free-standing structure in Europe, was destroyed by fire.

In a further attempt to rationalize military spending, Russia’s defence minister, Igor Sergeyev, announced in September plans for a dramatic reduction of the armed forces by up to one third. The army had already been reduced to 1.2 million personnel, which would be further cut by 350,000 by 2003. All sections of the military are affected, including the Strategic Rocket Force, Russia’s long-range nuclear missile divisions. Later in the year, in November, the Russian Security Council approved measures aimed at the reduction of the country’s armed forces by 600,000 personnel by 2005—a 20 per cent cut.

A possible attempt to appease leaders of Russia’s 89 constituent regions and republics, whose powers were drastically reduced with the creation of “super-regions”, was made in September when a new body, called the State Council of the Russian Federation, was created. As its role was defined as advisory and consultative, and membership was described as voluntary, many observers and regional leaders doubted whether the Council would have any authoritative function.

In October, a joint Russian-Norwegian mission began a salvage operation of the Kursk submarine. The diving team halted the operation in November, having recovered 12 bodies. The Kursk was finally raised and transferred to a dry dock near Murmansk in October 2001; the recovery of its bow was planned for summer 2002.

At the end of December 2000, both houses of the legislature approved a new anthem and national symbols. The new national anthem uses the music of the Soviet anthem, composed by Aleksandr Aleksandrov in 1943, but with different words (penned by the author of the original Soviet song, Sergei Mikhalkov). The Soviet anthem had been abolished in 1993 but an attempt to introduce a tune by Mikhail Glinka proved unpopular. The old tsarist colours of white, blue, and red were accepted as Russia’s flag, and the double-headed eagle, also a tsarist symbol, was approved as a national emblem. The Soviet red flag was preserved as the banner of the Russian armed forces.

In a move that was interpreted as a further attempt to centralize power, the Duma passed a new law, in February 2001, reducing the number of political parties by banning small groupings. Parties of fewer than 10,000 members with branches in fewer than 45 provinces would no longer be legal. The move outlawed about 90 out of the estimated 180 political groupings in Russia.

In early 2001, reacting to new defence initiatives in the United States and to the perceived threat of NATO’s expansion eastward, Russia formulated a European alternative to the proposed US national defence system, the NMD (National Missile Defence) programme. The Russian plan, known as Euro-Pro, was fully outlined in February. The proposal featured a mobile shield of anti-missiles, capable of intercepting and destroying missiles within 3,500-km (2,175-mi) range, which could be moved quickly across large distances. It was emphasized that Euro-Pro would abide by the terms of the 1972 ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) treaty. Both France and Germany showed signs of interest in the programme, whereas the US government ultimately agreed to discuss the plan with Russia.

Later in 2001 there were also signs of Russia’s increased interest in a closer relationship with the European Union (EU). At a summit in May, Russia declared its openness to an integration with—though not membership of—the organization. Partly in connection with this, a package of anti-corruption laws and legislation aimed at combating money laundering were introduced. In June 2002, the Duma approved a bill to legalize the sale of agricultural land, though foreign citizens are restricted to leasing, rather than buying, land.

In the aftermath of terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001, Russia declared its full assistance in the international campaign against terrorism. In particular, the authorities decided to share with the United States their intelligence information concerning Afghanistan, to open Russia’s airspace for “humanitarian purposes”, and to cooperate with Afghan opposition forces. The support for military action concentrated, however, mainly on combating Chechen rebels, some of whom, Russian authorities claimed, were connected to the Al-Qaeda terrorist and military network. Consequently, on one the hand, the relationship between Russia and the United States appeared to have warmed considerably; on the other hand, there was also a major shift in the Western diplomatic perception of the conflict in Chechnya. The renewed closeness between the two countries manifested itself in two treaties signed in May 2002. The first committed Russia and the United States to reducing their nuclear arsenals by two thirds over the next ten years, while the second established the NATO-Russia Council to coordinate counter-terrorism, peacekeeping, and arms control initiatives.

Meanwhile, the conflict between the Russian authorities and Chechen rebels continued with a spate of attacks on Russian military helicopters overflying the region. The worst incident took place in August 2002 when a Mi-26 troop carrier was shot down near Groznyy, resulting in 115 deaths. In October the clashes took on a new form when 50 Chechen rebels seized a theatre in Moscow, holding hostage around 800 theatre-goers and demanding an end to the war. The siege was ended by Russian special forces, who killed the captors and in the region of 120 hostages in a much-criticized assault on the building. In December 2002 the headquarters of the Moscow-sponsored Chechen administration in Groznyy was attacked by suicide bombers resulting in the deaths of more than 50 people. In May 2003 a bomb attack against a government building in the north of Chechnya claimed the lives of more than 50 people. In a separate attack the leader of the Chechen administration, Mufti Akhmed Kadyrov, narrowly escaped death. Mozdok in North Ossetia, Russia's military headquarters for operations in Chechnya, was also the scene of serious incidents. In June 2003 suicide bombers attacked the headquarters, killing 20 people. In August a bomb at a military hospital claimed the lives of 50 people. Suicide attacks by Chechen rebels against the installations and the institutions of the Russian military continued into 2004.

In May 2003, Russia ratified the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty. In September Kyrgyzstan allowed the use of a military base at Kant for Russia to develop a rapid reaction force to counter terrorism.

A border dispute between Russia and Ukraine broke out as a result of Russia starting work on a causeway across the Kerch Strait from the Russian coast to the Ukrainian island of Tuzla off the shore of the Crimea, in October 2003. The dispute was settled two months later with the signing of an agreement on the joint use of the Kerch Strait and the status of the Sea of Azov, which became a joint waterway for both countries.

President Putin strengthened his grip on power throughout 2003. The closure in June of TVS, the last independent television channel, officially as a result of financial considerations, was viewed by many observers as a bid to curb the freedom of the media in Russia. In October, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the giant Yukos oil company, was arrested and jailed, accused of fraud and tax evasion. Khodorkovsky had been a key supporter of the opposition to President Putin.

In February 2004 Putin took the drastic step of sacking his entire government, replacing Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov with Mikhail Fradkov, the former Russian envoy to the European Union. The move was seen as a further purging of officials of the Yeltsin era ahead of the presidential election scheduled for March. The election brought a landslide victory for Putin, who received 71.2 per cent of the vote.

The Chechnya situation hit the headlines once more in August 2004. First, two Russian civilian airliners crashed within minutes of each other, shortly after taking off from Moscow airport. Eighty-nine people perished. Within days the incidents were being blamed on Chechen female suicide-bombers from an Islamist terrorist group known as the Islambouli Brigades. Days later, the same group claimed responsibility for a suspected car bomb explosion outside an underground railway station in Moscow, in which ten people were killed. The group claimed the attacks were carried out in support of Muslims in Chechnya.

Secondly, on September 1, armed terrorists seized a school in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia, taking more than 1,000 children, teachers, and parents hostage. The siege, and standoff by the Russian special forces, lasted for nearly three days before ending in violence with more than 320 people—many of them children—being killed, with hundreds more wounded. The terrorists, though not formally identified, were thought to have been Chechen and Ingush rebels, demanding the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya. The failure of Russian special forces to resolve the crisis led to criticism from both within and outside Russia. Putin blamed Chechen leaders, including Aslan Maskhadov, for the atrocity while refusing to either consider negotiations with Chechen separatists or call a public inquiry into the attack. Instead he called for a radical shake-up of security throughout the country that also included measures to strengthen his own hand, such as nominating regional governors and changing the way the lower house of parliament is elected. Other proposals, such as the re-introduction of the death penalty, were also debated.

In February 2005, Maskhadov called for a ceasefire in the violence, while maintaining that he had played no part in the Beslan school siege. However, in March he was killed by Russian special forces, in the village of Tolstoy-Yurt, near Groznyy. A year later Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev was killed by Russian forces. Basayev was believed to have been responsible for both the Moscow Dubrovka theatre and Beslan atrocities and the murder of Chechen president Akhmed Kadyrov.

Former president Boris Yeltsin died on April 23, 2007, and was accorded a state funeral. He was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow.

Prime Minister Fradkov’s priorities during his term of office had centred on improving cooperation between Russia’s federal and regional governments but in September 2007 he submitted his resignation to Putin, who stated that changes in government were necessary in preparation for the approaching change of president at the end of his second, and final, term. Putin named Viktor Zubkov as the new prime minister while he himself outlined plans to stand for the position. At legislative elections held in December 2007, United Russia, the political bloc loyal to Putin, won almost 65 per cent of the vote, although the legitimacy of the elections was disputed by some international bodies, including the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe. Following the election Putin stated that his preferred successor as president was the first deputy prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev duly won the March presidential election, gaining 70 per cent of the vote. He indicated that Russian foreign and domestic policy would continue largely unchanged.