History: pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union

In the course of the 9th century, Viking tribes from Scandinavia moved southward into European Russia, tracing a path along the main waterway connecting the Baltic and Black Seas. The first monarchic dynasty, which ruled until the Mongol invasion of the 13th century, built Kiev as its capital. The Mongol Empire, which stretched across the Asian continent, was divided into a number of 'hordes' or individual kingdoms; Russia was put under the suzerainty of the Khanate of the Golden Horde. 

The next two centuries saw the rise of Moscow as a provincial capital and center of the Christian Orthodox Church. In the late 15th century the Grand Prince of Moscow, Ivan III (the Great), annexed the rival principalities of Russia, including the Novgorod Republic to the north, thus becoming the first national sovereign. His grandson Ivan IV (better known as Ivan the Terrible) further expanded the state to the south and into Siberia. He was the first to hold the title of Tsar (derived from 'Caesar'). The political history of the period from 1500 until the mid-17th century was characterised by struggles between the tsar and the rich, powerful landed nobility, known as the boyars. 

The Russian empire expanded gradually to acquire land to the south as far as the Caspian Sea and eastwards into Siberia. The two most important rulers of Russia in the 17th and 18th centuries were Peter the Great ), who cemented the regime and established Russia as a leading European power, and Catherine the Great (1762-96), generally recognised as an astute and energetic ruler, who pursued a policy of enlightened despotism at home while continuing the aggressive foreign policy initiated by Peter.

In the first quarter of the 19th century, under Tsar Alexander I, the first steps were taken to dismantle the system of serfdom under which most people lived. The process was disrupted, however, by Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The French were driven out in 1812 and Napoleon's army destroyed in the legendary retreat from Moscow. Alexander's successor completed the growth of the empire into the Caucasus (now Georgia) and Armenia and reached agreement with England about the division of Central Asia into spheres of influence. Most of Siberia had been annexed by the 1840s, but the expansion to the south and east (creating more or less the present frontiers of the CIS) was not complete until 1905.

 Domestic policies remained conservative: pressure for political and economic reform was met only with repression. By February 1917, the populace engulfed Russia in widespread strikes, rioting and army mutinies, which forced the Tsar to abdicate. The liberal Provisional Government which took control was forced out of office by a Bolshevik coup in October of that year. The Bolsheviks (majority faction) were the more radical product of the split in the Social Democratic Party, formed in 1898, upon which much of the organised opposition to the regime was focused. Under the leadership of Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, the Bolsheviks moved quickly to consolidate their position, bringing land, industry and finance under state control. Within two years, having seen off the military challenge of the right-wing White Armies backed by the major European powers, who sought the re-establishment of the tsarist regime, the Bolsheviks were firmly in control. 

Lenin died in 1924 and was succeeded by Josef Stalin (Djugashvili) who instituted a crash program of industrialisation and the forced collectivisation of agriculture. Famine and massive purges were the hallmark of this period. In 1941, the USSR was invaded by Nazi Germany, despite having signed a peace treaty with Hitler in 1939, in the start of what Soviets referred to as the Great Patriotic War. Like Napoleon before him, Hitler's armies were driven out, again with massive loss of life on the Russian side (an estimated 20 million people). A large reconstruction effort had, by the early 1950s, repaired much of the war damage. 

In the meantime, the USSR had become the world's second nuclear power, having exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949, and sponsored the formation of a buffer zone of communist-controlled governments in Eastern Europe. The occasional instability of these regimes led the USSR to intervene militarily on two occasions - in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Foreign policy has since been dominated by relations with the USA, which fluctuated from outright hostility to the 'Cold Peace' of detente. The two sides came to the brink of nuclear war in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The Soviet Union was by now in the hands of Stalin's successor, Nikita Krushchev, who shocked the Communist Party in 1956 by revealing the extent of Stalin's brutality. Also during Krushchev's term, the split with China, which fractured the unity of the world communist movement, took place; the two countries have been at loggerheads ever since. 

After Krushchev's fall from power in 1964, the USSR was led until 1982 by Leonid Brezhnev. In retrospect, the Brezhnev years are seen as a period of stability and relaxation in international tensions (although he took the USSR into Afghanistan) coupled with domestic stagnation and inertia, presided over by an ageing and unimaginative party leadership. 

The very last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, took over the leadership in March 1985, after a 3-year inter-regnum of two General Secretaries, Andropov and Chernenko, who were more often than not indisposed by ill health. Gorbachev instigated a program of social, political and economic reform, and a wholesale diplomatic offensive abroad, not only on nuclear arms control, but also in regional policies and relations with the Third World. An early success for Gorbachev was the treaty on Intermediate Nuclear Forces, signed in December 1987, which eliminated a whole category of superpower nuclear armaments. Another protracted dispute with the Americans was settled in early 1989, when the last Soviet forces left Afghanistan after a decade of fighting. 

At home, Gorbachev's program centered on the slogan-concepts of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (ess). At the heart of the glasnost policy was the liberalisation of the media, which have since played an important role in bringing to popular attention policy errors and official mismanagement, previously hidden from most people. When Gorbachev took office he declared that the 'nationalities problem' - a reference to 100-plus distinct ethnic groups in the Soviet Union - was the most serious facing the nation. He was quickly proved right as the relaxation of the state stranglehold over the country's political and social life allowed simmering aspirations and resentments to come to the surface, particularly in the southern republics of Trans-Caucasia and Central Asia. As the dire state of the economy became apparent, the Soviet Union all but ceased to be a player on the international arena, illustrated by its lack of reaction to the Kuwait crisis of 1990 (where the Soviet Union meekly followed the US line) and its lack of resistance to Western terms on the reunification of Germany.

 Gorbachev made his final stand by setting himself firmly against the dissolution of the USSR, despite growing demand in the republics for independence. The Baltic Republics were particularly adamant on this issue and organised plebiscites which proved that independence enjoyed overwhelming popular support. Gorbachev's disastrous decision to send the Red Army into Lithuania in early 1991 to prevent it from seceding, marked the beginning of the end. Squeezed by radicals and secessionists on one side and conservative elements in the military and KGB on the other, Gorbachev's position was becoming increasingly untenable.