Russia

Our story begins not with a nation, but with a river, the Dnieper. It was a great artery of trade and migration, and down it, in the ninth century, came the Varangians, Viking adventurers known to the local Slavic tribes as the Rus'. They were traders and warriors, and from their fortified settlements, a state began to coalesce: Kievan Rus'. For centuries, this loose federation of principalities flourished, its cities rich with the scent of beeswax and the gleam of Byzantine silk. The decisive moment came in 988, when Grand Prince Vladimir the Great, seeking a faith to unify his people, famously rejected Islam for its prohibition of alcohol and Roman Catholicism for its somber churches. He chose instead the Eastern Orthodox Christianity of Byzantium, captivated by the sheer glory of its rituals in Constantinople, where his emissaries reported they “knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.” This choice would forever root Russia’s soul in the art, mysticism, and spiritual tradition of the East, defining its culture, its alphabet, and its destiny.

This golden age was shattered in the 13th century by a storm from the steppes. The Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous land empire in history, swept across the land with terrifying speed and efficiency. In 1240, the magnificent city of Kiev, with its golden-domed cathedrals, was razed to the ground, its population massacred. For the next 240 years, the Russian principalities lived under the shadow of the Golden Horde, forced to pay immense tribute to a distant Khan. Yet, in this period of humiliation, a new center of power was quietly growing. The small, wooden fort of Moscow, strategically positioned on the Moskva River, began to thrive. Its princes proved to be shrewd, patient, and utterly ruthless, acting as the Khan's chief tax collectors, absorbing smaller principalities, and biding their time. The slow, inexorable rise culminated in 1480, when Ivan the Third, known as “the Great,” stood with his army on the Ugra River, facing the Mongols in a tense standoff that ended not with a great battle, but with the Horde’s withdrawal. Russia had thrown off the yoke.

With freedom came a new, formidable identity. Moscow declared itself the “Third Rome,” the heir to the fallen Roman and Byzantine empires, the last bastion of true Orthodox faith. This messianic vision found its ultimate expression in Ivan the Third’s grandson, Ivan the Fourth, who in 1547 was crowned the first Tsar of All Russia. History would remember him as Ivan the Terrible. He was a figure of startling contradictions: a brilliant legal and military reformer who commissioned the dizzyingly beautiful St. Basil’s Cathedral, yet a man consumed by paranoia and rage. After the death of his beloved wife Anastasia, his mind darkened. He unleashed the Oprichnina, a private army of thousands clad in black, who terrorized the noble boyar families, riding with a dog’s head and a broom attached to their saddles to symbolize their mission to sniff out and sweep away treason. His reign, and his murder of his own son and heir in a fit of rage, plunged the nation into a period of anarchy after his death known as the Time of Troubles, a dark decade of famine, civil war, and foreign invasion that nearly extinguished the Russian state.

Out of the ashes, in 1613, a new dynasty was chosen to lead: the Romanovs. For over a century, they restored order and expanded the state’s borders. Then came the man who would reshape Russia in his own image: Peter the Great. A physical giant, standing nearly six feet eight inches tall, Peter was a force of nature, possessed by a restless, manic energy. Disgusted by what he saw as the backwardness of old Muscovy, he traveled to Western Europe, working incognito as a shipwright in Holland and England, absorbing technology and ideas. He returned to Russia with a singular, brutal vision: to westernize his nation by force. He ordered his nobles to shave their long, traditional beards, imposing a tax on those who refused. He reformed the army, built a modern navy from scratch, and in 1703, began construction of a new capital. On a desolate, malarial swamp, at the cost of an estimated 100,000 serf lives, he built Saint Petersburg, his “window to Europe,” a magnificent city of baroque palaces and classical avenues, a deliberate rejection of Moscow’s Slavic past.

Power passed through a series of weaker rulers until another formidable German-born monarch seized the throne in a coup: Catherine the Great. A master of public relations, she cultivated the image of an “enlightened despot,” corresponding with Voltaire and Diderot and championing the arts. Yet her enlightenment rarely extended beyond her court. While she expanded the Russian Empire more than any ruler since Ivan the Terrible, absorbing Crimea and partitioning Poland out of existence, life for the vast majority of her subjects—the serfs—grew harsher. Their discontent exploded in the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773-1775, a massive peasant war that swept across the land, a terrifying reminder of the deep, violent chasm between the glittering, French-speaking aristocracy and the oppressed masses who worked the soil.

The 19th century was a time of immense trial and contradiction. In 1812, Russia faced its greatest test when Napoleon Bonaparte, master of Europe, invaded with his Grande Armée of over 600,000 men. The Russians employed a scorched-earth strategy, retreating deeper and deeper into the vastness of their country. They made the ultimate sacrifice: setting fire to their own holy city of Moscow to deny Napoleon shelter. The French emperor watched the city burn from the Kremlin, a victory that was in fact a death sentence. The brutal Russian winter did the rest, annihilating his army during its long retreat. This triumph solidified Russia’s status as a great European power, but it also exposed a deep internal sickness. Russian officers who had marched to Paris returned with liberal ideas, culminating in the failed Decembrist Revolt of 1825. The central issue was serfdom, a system of human bondage that hobbled the nation. Finally, in 1861, Tsar Alexander the Second, the “Liberator,” took the monumental step of emancipating over 23 million serfs. It was a revolutionary act, but for many, it was too little, too late. The very man who freed the serfs was assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881, plunging Russia back into an era of reaction and repression.

The final act of the Romanov dynasty was a tragedy. Tsar Nicholas the Second was a gentle family man ill-suited to autocratic rule in a time of seismic change. His reign was beset by disaster: a humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, followed by the “Bloody Sunday” massacre, where imperial troops fired on peaceful protestors in Saint Petersburg, shattering the centuries-old bond between the Tsar and his people. The final blow was World War One. The ill-equipped Russian army was thrown into a meat grinder, suffering millions of casualties. At home, food shortages and political instability reached a boiling point. In February 1917, strikes and riots in the capital, now named Petrograd, spiraled into a full-blown revolution. The army refused to fire on the people, and Nicholas the Second was forced to abdicate. The Romanov dynasty, after 304 years, was over.

A fragile provisional government attempted to install a democracy, but it was a candle in a hurricane. In the shadows, a disciplined and fanatical group of Marxists, the Bolsheviks, were waiting. Led by the brilliant and utterly ruthless Vladimir Lenin, they offered the exhausted population a simple, powerful promise: “Peace, Land, and Bread.” In October 1917, they seized power in a swift coup, establishing the world's first Communist state. What followed was not peace, but a vicious Civil War that pitted their Red Army against a fragmented collection of “White” anti-Bolshevik forces. In July 1918, in a cellar in the city of Yekaterinburg, the former Tsar, his wife Alexandra, and their five children were brutally executed, an act designed to erase the past and ensure there was no turning back.

From the crucible of war, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, was born. After Lenin’s death in 1924, a power struggle brought a new man to the helm: Joseph Stalin. A name that would become synonymous with terror. To transform the USSR into an industrial superpower, Stalin launched the Five-Year Plans, a campaign of brutal, forced industrialization. To fund it, he declared war on the peasantry through forced collectivization of agriculture. The result was a man-made famine, the Holodomor in Ukraine, which killed millions. In the late 1930s, his paranoia unleashed the Great Terror, a period of state-sponsored murder where an estimated 750,000 people were executed and millions more were sent to the vast network of forced labor camps known as the Gulag, often for no reason other than to meet an arrest quota.

This brutalized nation would soon face its ultimate test. In June 1941, Nazi Germany launched a surprise invasion, Operation Barbarossa. The conflict on the Eastern Front, which the Soviets called the Great Patriotic War, was warfare on a scale of unprecedented savagery. The siege of Leningrad lasted nearly 900 days, killing over a million civilians from starvation alone. The Battle of Stalingrad, a turning point in the war, reduced the city to rubble and consumed over two million lives on both sides. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the fight against Nazism, and its sacrifice was staggering: an estimated 27 million Soviet citizens, both soldiers and civilians, perished. In May 1945, the Red Army’s triumphant raising of the hammer and sickle flag over the bombed-out Reichstag in Berlin was a moment of immense national pride, purchased at an unimaginable price.

The victory did not bring peace, but a new kind of conflict: the Cold War. The USSR consolidated its control over Eastern Europe behind what Winston Churchill called an “Iron Curtain,” and for the next four decades, the world lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation as the two superpowers, the USA and the USSR, vied for global supremacy. The Soviets shocked the world by launching the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, and sending the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space in 1961. The world held its breath during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. But beneath the veneer of military might and space-age achievement, the centrally planned economy was stagnating, and the society was suffocated by a lack of freedom. A disastrous decade-long war in Afghanistan in the 1980s proved to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam.

The end came swiftly and unexpectedly. In 1985, a new, younger leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power. He sought to revitalize the decaying system with his policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). But instead of reforming Communism, he unleashed forces he could not contain. Freedom of speech exposed the system’s crimes and inefficiencies. Nationalist movements in the captive republics surged. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. On Christmas Day, 1991, following a failed coup by hardliners, Gorbachev resigned. The red flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time. After seventy-four years, the Soviet experiment was over. The nation, once again called Russia, entered a new, turbulent era, grappling with the legacy of its immense, tragic, and monumental history—a story that continues to unfold.