Why is Russia Like This?
A Crash Course in Russian History, from Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir Putin
For much of its history, Europe has seen Russia as a backward boogeyman on the periphery of the continent. Not quite European, but not entirely Asian either. Not belonging to the East or the West. The professor of a Russian history class I took in college called this “Geo-schizophrenia,” an existential confusion of the Russian people as to their place in the world. Do they belong to the East, West, or something else entirely? For centuries, Russia has been influenced by many outside cultures, from the Byzantine Empire and Norse Vikings to the Mongol Empire and later Western Europe. But how did Russia become the country it is today? What series of events led to the modern Russian state we know today, and why have they culminated in its invasion of Ukraine? This article will endeavor to answer these questions by explaining Russian history as briefly as possible.
The Kievan Rus, Mongol Yoke, and Rise of Moscow (882–1533)
Russia has its roots, of all places, in Kyiv, the modern-day capital city of Ukraine. The Primary Chronicle, a medieval source created by Kievan monks in the 12th century, tells a story of the Slavic tribes of modern northwestern Russia inviting Varangian (a term for Vikings in Eastern Europe) Rus princes, led by a man named Rurik, to rule over them from Novgorod around the year 862. The story goes that the son of Rurik, Oleg the Wise, conquered Kyiv/Kiev (Kyiv is the Ukrainian spelling while Kiev is the Russian spelling. I will be using the Ukrainian spelling for the city itself as that is the country which the city is in today) and established it as his new capital, creating the Kievan Rus with himself as Grand Prince. However, as it was written centuries after the fact, the legitimacy of this story is debated. It seems likely that later Rurikid rulers had this story commissioned to establish their legitimacy as rulers. Regardless, what is clear is that Kyiv was the center of a state that we call today the Kievan Rus. This state was the progenitor of the three modern East Slavic countries, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
From their capital at Kyiv, the Rus came under the cultural influence of the nearby Byzantine Empire. In 988, Grand Prince Vladimir converted to the Orthodox Christianity of the Byzantines, beginning the slow process of Christianizing the mostly Pagan Slavic people of the Kievan Rus. In this period, the Kievan Rus was a decentralized feudal monarchy made up of many principalities that were theoretically under the rule of the Grand Prince of Kyiv, but whose princes governed their own territories in practice. By the 11th century, the Kievan Rus was divided between many wealthy principalities whose capital cities became important commercial centers, the most powerful of which were Kyiv and Novgorod. Interestingly, Novgorod was also controlled by a republican form of government, led by a veche, a kind of town council. The veche elected the city’s mayor (called the posadnik) and by 1126, even elected the Prince of Novgorod.
However, despite its increasing wealth, power, and connections to other European kingdoms, the Kievan Rus was still plagued by a major issue: geography. This region of the continent is essentially one massive flat plain, making the Kievan Rus an easy target for invasion by an outside power, in this case, the Mongol Empire. Led by Batu Khan, one of Ghengis Khan’s grandsons, the Mongols swept through the Kievan Rus in 1237, destroying many towns including Ryazan, Vladimir, and Kyiv by 1240. Kyiv itself was obliterated with the majority of its population of 40,000 massacred, bringing the Kievan Rus to an end. The Mongols established the Golden Horde on the South Russian Steppe, governed from its capital city of Sarai. Eastern Rus principalities, one of which was a small town by the name of “Moscow,” became vassals of the Golden Horde and were forced to pay tribute and supply troops to their Mongol overlords. Other Rus principalities further west, including the modern capitals of Ukraine and Belarus, Kyiv, and Minsk, fell under the sway of Poland and Lithuania, two other major players in the region. This divide is where we can begin to see what would become Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus split from their common roots and begin developing separately. The new Mongol-dominated system was similarly decentralized as the Kievan Rus but was instead “governed” by the Grand Prince of Vladimir, who was selected by the Golden Horde.
Over the next few centuries, Moscow grew its influence and expanded among the Mongol-dominated principalities until finally managing to defeat the Golden Horde at the 1380 Battle of Kulikovo, asserting the independence of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. During its expansion, Moscow adopted the autocratic style of rule of the Mongols which would continue to inspire future Russian governments for generations. Moscow also utilized a traditional landowning noble class, called boyars, in a feudal system dominated by the Grand Prince. In 1533, the three-year-old Ivan IV became Grand Prince of Moscow. As an adult, he would become known more famously known as “Ivan the Terrible,” the first Tsar of Russia.
The Beginning of the Russian Tsardom (1533–1721)
Although he was officially the Grand Prince of Moscow from the age of 3, Ivan IV gave himself an even higher title at the age of 16. In 1547, Ivan was crowned as “Tsar of all Russia,” a title translating to “emperor,” implying that Ivan saw himself as the successor of the Byzantine (Roman) Empire, which had fallen in the previous century. Moscow metropolitan Makary, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, crowned Ivan himself, showing the deep ties between the Russian monarchy and the church. As early as Ivan’s reign we can see the idea of “Holy Russia,” a belief that Russia is a holy nation governed by a divinely inspired Tsar. As both a Byzantine-influenced and Mongol-influenced monarch, the new Tsar took on an autocratic style of rule backed by the Russian Orthodox Church, which proclaimed Ivan as God’s representative on Earth. Under the Tsardom, the idea developed that Moscow was the “Third Rome,” (Rome itself being the first and Constantinople being the second) due to the adoption of the religious and cultural heritage of the Byzantine Empire. The Russian view that their country is the true successor to the Roman Empire is a recurring idea throughout Russian history. Ivan IV would eventually come to be known as “Ivan Grozny,” which, although often translated to English as “the Terrible,” might be better translated as “the Formidable,” or “the Severe.”
During his reign, Ivan IV expanded Russia’s borders, conquering the remnants of the Golden Horde, the Kazan Khanate, and the Astrakhan Khanate, in the 1550s, as well as beginning the colonization of Siberia. Ivan also greatly expanded the power of the Russian crown over the boyars, forcing them to be reliant on the Tsar, modernized the Russian army, and created the Zemsky Sobor, an advisory assembly of boyars and clergy. However, in 1581, Ivan murdered his son and heir, also named Ivan. The story goes that the Tsar had struck his son’s wife for “indecent conduct,” (wearing only underwear in her chambers). When the 27-year-old prince Ivan tried to stop his father, the Tsar struck him in the head with his staff, killing him.
Now, Ivan’s only heir was his other son, Feodor, who succeeded the Tsar after his death in 1584. Feodor reigned until his own death in 1598 without an heir. With no more surviving heirs of the Rurikid dynasty, Russia descended into civil war as boyars scrambled to seize the throne. From 1598 to 1612, the throne passed to 6 different Tsars. Boris Godunov, a boyar (reigned from 1598–1605), and his son Feodor II Godunov (reigned in 1605), False Dmitry I, a pretender who claimed to be one of Ivan IV’s dead sons (reigned from 1605–1606), Vasily IV Shuisky, another boyar (reigned 1606–1610), and Vladislav, a Polish prince placed on the throne by the invading Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (reigned 1610–1612). This tumultuous and bloody period is known as the Time of Troubles. During this period, a major famine killed thousands, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Swedish Empire both invaded Russia, Sweden occupied Novgorod the Poles occupied Moscow itself.
The Time of Troubles came to an end as the Poles were forced out of the country and a young boyar, Michael Romanov, was crowned Tsar by the Zemsky Sobor in 1613. Michael and his successors established and continued the Romanov dynasty, ruling Russia much the same as the previous Rurikid dynasty had. However, in 1682, Peter I, who would be come to known as Peter the Great, ascended to the throne as Tsar and brought about enormous reforms in Russia.
The Rise of the Russian Empire (1721–1815)
After assuming the throne, Peter began to pivot Russia toward Western Europe. By this point in history, Western Europe had become the most technologically and economically developed part of the world, while Russia’s economy had remained largely agrarian and technologically backward. In 1697, Peter began a diplomatic visit across Western Europe called the “Grand Embassy,” visiting the Netherlands and England before returning to Russia in 1698. In Western Europe, Peter saw an ideal for him to emulate in his own country. In 1700, a conflict known as the Great Northern War broke out in which Russia, Denmark–Norway, and Poland-Lithuania fought the Swedish Empire, a major power in the region. After over two decades of war, the Swedes were defeated and their empire lost territory to its enemies, including some of its Baltic Sea territories to the Russians. In 1721, Peter crowned himself “Emperor,” a Western-style title, rather than Tsar, renaming his state the Russian Empire. Regardless, the term “Tsar” continued to be used until the 20th century and the Emperors would still claim a divine mandate to rule “Holy Russia.”
In 1703, Peter founded the city of Saint Petersburg on former Swedish Baltic Sea territory as a new, Western-style capital of his empire in the image of Western European port cities such as Amsterdam and Venice. Thousands of peasants were conscripted to help construct the new imperial capital, many of whom died in the harsh work environment. Through brute force, Peter reformed the Russian taxation system, instituted military conscription, began to create the first Russian Navy, and forced the empire to adopt more European cultural ideas. Peter even forced the Russian Orthodox clergy to shave their Orthodox-style long beards. Essentially, Peter shifted Russia from its old Byzantine and Mongol cultural influences to emulate Western Europe. By the end of Peter’s reign with his death in 1725, Russia was changed irrevocably. The Russian Orthodox Church was no longer a relatively equal ally to the Crown but was firmly under the dominance of the Emperor, and Russia’s capital was now the Western-style port city of Saint Petersburg rather than the old capital of Moscow.
One of Peter’s reforms was to allow the Emperor to choose their own heir as he had no surviving male heirs by 1722. Peter chose his wife, Catherine, as his heir, who became Empress of Russia in 1725 until her death in 1727. Catherine was succeeded by Peter II a grandson of Peter the Great via his son Alexei (who was executed by Peter for treason in 1718). Over the ensuing decades, the Russian throne passed indirectly to several Emperors and Empresses of the Romanov family as none were the children of the previous ruler. Interestingly more than half of these rulers were Empresses. In 1762, the throne passed to Peter III, a grandson of Peter the Great. However, Peter III’s reign was short as he was overthrown by his wife, Catherine II. As Empress, she would become known as Catherine the Great.
Catherine, born Princess Sophie in a small German state, was married to the Russian Prince Peter in 1745. She quickly embraced Russian culture and religion, converting to Orthodox Christianity and changing her name from the German “Sophie,” to the Russian “Yekaterina,” or “Catherine” in English. In contrast, Peter was a big fan of Prussia and its King, Frederick the Great. When Peter III ascended to the Russian Throne in 1761, he quickly changed sides to join Prussia in the ongoing Seven Years' War, in which Russia had previously been at war with Prussia. Within a few months of his reign, Peter III was overthrown by Catherine in a military coup. As Empress, Catherine II continued Peter the Great’s reforms and greatly expanded the borders of the Russian Empire into the Black Sea by conquering Crimea, as well as annexing large portions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, partitioning the country alongside Prussia and Austria.
By the beginning of the 19th century, Russia was one of the most powerful empires in Europe, and by extension, the world. The Russian Empire participated in the Napoleonic Wars, at times against France and at others aligned with Napoleon. Any positive relations between Napoleon and the Russian Emperor Alexander I ended when Napoleon launched his invasion of Russia in 1812. While this war is deserving of an article in and of itself, in summary, Napoleon invaded Russia with a multi-national army of over 600,000, the largest army ever assembled up to this point in history. Napoleon and his army defeated Russian forces at every turn, even taking Moscow itself following the bloody Battle of Borodino. However, when the French arrived in Moscow, they found the city burning as the Russian army scorched the city and retreated to prevent the French from gaining the critical logistical center that was Moscow. The French were ultimately forced to retreat due to attrition and guerilla warfare by Russian Cossacks. As it retreated from Russia, Napoleon’s Grand Armée was brought to its knees by Russian Cossack guerilla harassment, starvation, disease, and the harsh Russian winter. By the end, only around 120,000 soldiers remained in Napoleon’s Grand Armée, a crippling defeat from which the French Emperor never fully recovered.
Napoleon was ultimately defeated in the 1813–1814 War of the Sixth Coalition, of which Russia was an important member. In the wake of the defeat of Napoleon, Russia gained additional territory in Eastern Europe, conquering most of the French-aligned Polish Duchy of Warsaw and creating a new Kingdom of Poland, better known as Congress Poland, with the Russian Emperor as its King. While Napoleon and the French Empire were defeated, returning Russian soldiers brought liberalism and nationalism, the ideals of the French Revolution, back home with them. The Russian victory over Napoleon took on a religious undertone as Emperor Alexander became known to many Russians as a holy savior and liberator, while Napoleon was seen as the Antichrist. This war, which became known as the “Patriotic War” to Russians, left another mark on the Russian psyche, reinforcing the idea of “Holy Russia.”
The Russian Empire from its Apex to Collapse (1815–1917)
With Napoleon defeated and France humbled, the Russian Empire was now ascendant as the dominant military power in Europe. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, a new order known as the “Concert of Europe,” emerged as the Great Powers of Europe, Russia, the United Kingdom, France (now a constitutional monarchy once again under the pre-revolution Bourbon dynasty), Prussia, and Austria. The three most autocratic states, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, formed a coalition known as the Holy Alliance, which pledged to help one another put down any potential liberal and/or nationalist revolutions that might be inspired by the French Revolution.
In November of 1825, Emperor Alexander I died suddenly from typhus. Without a son, the crown was expected to pass to Alexander’s first brother, Gran Duke Konstantin. However, Konstantin had already renounced any claim to the Russian throne due to his marriage to a non-royal Polish woman. Konstantin chose to remain in Poland and keep his position as Viceroy of Congress Poland. Instead, Alexander’s third brother, Nicholas, was crowned Emperor Nicholas I. In December, a group of liberal and reformist military officers, creatively known as the Decembrists, rose up in revolt in Saint Petersburg to create a constitutional monarchy with Konstantin as Emporer. While this revolt was ultimately crushed and its leaders executed or exiled to Siberia, Nicholas I became paranoid about the possibility of revolution in Russia. In 1830, a revolt in Poland was crushed by Nicholas’ troops and all autonomy for Congress Poland was dissolved as it was directly annexed into the Russian Empire. In 1848-49, Nicholas committed Russian troops to put down a major revolution in Hungary, then part of the Austrian Empire, which was one of many revolutions across Europe in 1848. In his last few years, Nicholas led Russia into the Crimean War against the Ottomans, British, and French, which ended in a humiliating Russian defeat and hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides. This defeat strengthened a sense of anti-Western beliefs in Russia which still exists today. By the time of Nicholas’ death in 1855, the Russian Empire had reached its territorial height, controlling a vast domain from Poland to Alaska, from the Arctic Ocean to the Caspian Sea. Russia had also established itself as a defender of Orthodox Christianity and a champion of traditionalist European monarchies.
Nicholas I’s successor, Alexander II, who would come to be known as Alexander the Liberator, was crowned in 1855. Soon after, he brought the Crimean War to a close and pursued a less belligerent foreign policy than his predecessors. As Emperor, Alexander II ended serfdom, an economic system somewhere between slavery and feudalism, in 1861. While Russian peasants were emancipated from serfdom officially, peasants were still forced to pay their former landlords indemnities. Peasants formed communes known as obschinas or mirs. In these communes, peasants pooled what little resources they had to survive. Obschinas would serve as a model for future forms of Russian peasant socialism, which emerged in the late 19th century. Similarly, local self-governments known as zemstvos also emerged in this period. Although serfdom was abolished and the Russian economy was slowly improving, it was still far behind Western Europe and was seen as economically backward. Liberal and radical groups formed in this period, from liberal reformists to rural populists to revolutionary socialists and anarchists, discontent in the Russian Empire against the autocracy was growing in this period.
In 1881, Emperor Alexander II was assassinated by members of the radical socialist Narodnaya Volya, or the People’s Will terrorist group. Alexander’s successor, his son Alexander III, was a more repressive emperor, reversing many of his father’s reforms and suppressing minority groups, including Poles, Ukrainians, Armenians, and Jews, and attempting to russify them. Alexander III died in 1894 and was succeded by his ill-prepared son, Nicholas II, who would become known to history as Russia’s last Tsar. As Emperor, Nicholas II presided over another humiliating military defeat in the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War. This defeat was followed by a major revolution, the Russian Revolution of 1905. Although the government managed to crush the revolt, the Emperor was forced to accept a constitution, creating a parliament and theoretically limiting the power of the Tsar. However, the Emperor appointed the Prime Minister and could dissolve the Duma (the name of the Russian lower house) whenever he pleased. In practice, Russia remained an autocracy with a rubber-stamp parliament.
In 1914, Russia would be one of many nations embroiled in World War One. This war would prove to be another catastrophic defeat for Russia. Unable to soundly defeat the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary, Russia was once again enflamed by revolution in 1917. As an autocracy, there was nobody to blame for Russia’s disastrous defeats other than Tsar Nicholas II himself, especially when he took personal command of the Russian Army in 1915. The February Revolution began in March of 1917 (Russia used a different calendar at the time), and resulted in the overthrow of Nicholas II and the creation of a republic under the liberal Provisional Government. At the same time, socialist workers’ councils known as “Soviets,” organized their own government in Saint Petersburg, the Petrograd Soviet (Saint Petersburg had been renamed to Petrograd after the beginning of WWI to avoid a German connotation). These two governments were forced to share power. The Provisional Government chose to continue Russia’s disastrous involvement in WWI, which would prove to be its undoing.
In November of the same year, the October Revolution swept the Provisional Government out of power, replacing it with the Bolshevik Party led by Vladimir Lenin. Through promises of peace, bread, and land, the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd. In response, the Russian Civil War began soon after with the Bolshevik Red Army opposed by the White Army, a loose coalition of different anti-Bolshevik groups ranging from socialists to liberals and conservatives. While the new communist government made peace with Germany in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, they were forced to give up substantial lands in the west in this treaty, including Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia.
The Rise and Fall of Communism (1917–1991)
The Russian Civil War that followed was a massive and convoluted conflict with the Red Army fighting the anti-Bolshevik White Army. At the same time, various separatist groups across the former Russian Empire fought the Reds and Whites for independence. While the Red Army was unified in its purpose and was led by effective organizer Leon Trotsky, the White Army was divided in its ultimate goals and split up among several different fronts and different leaders. While the Whites were united in their goal of overthrowing the Bolsheviks, they disagreed on what to do afterward. Should Russia become a democratic republic? Should it be capitalist or socialist? Should the monarchy be restored under a relative of Nicholas II (Nicholas and his family were murdered by Red Army guards while under house arrest in July of 1918)? If so, should it stay an autocracy or become a constitutional monarchy? These questions divided the disparate factions of the White Army and contributed to their failure in the Russian Civil War.
Ultimately, the separatist movements in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland were successful and independent states were established for each. Numerous outside powers also got involved in the civil war, with Japanese, American, British, French, German, Austrian, and Ottoman troops intervening to varying degrees. The Red Army’s effective organization and control of Russia’s industrial regions coupled with the White Army’s lack of cohesion between its several factions in different regions of the former empire, the Red Army was victorious by the end of 1922. However, the Red Army was stopped from expanding further west into former Russian territories in Poland and the Baltic by their defeat in the 1919–21 Polish-Soviet War.
The Bolsheviks, now renamed the Russian Communist Party, were now ascendant in Russia with most former territories of the empire under their control by the end of 1922. On December 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was officially formed with Vladimir Lenin at its head. While the Soviet Union was officially a federation of equal socialist republics, it was effectively a one-party dictatorship dominated by Russia and governed from Moscow. Interestingly, over the course of his rule, Lenin took on something of a semi-religious personality cult, especially after he survived an assassination attempt in 1918. Lenin was often seen as an almost Christlike champion of the people. This idea, along with the Communist Party taking leadership of socialist movements around the world, ties communist rule back to the concept of Holy Russia and Moscow as the Third Rome. Under Lenin, the New Economic Policy (NEP), a policy of a market economy under government significant oversight, was instituted in hopes of industrializing the Soviet Union. The NEP proved unpopular among many urban workers due to it being perceived as a step backward into capitalism. However, it did help to rebuild the economy from the devastation of WWI and the Russian Civil War and greatly increased agricultural output.
While Leon Trotsky had been Lenin’s intended successor, a Georgian (the country not the state) member of the Communist Party by the name of Joseph Stalin had been amassing power within the government and successfully took power after Lenin’s death. Trotsky lost his position and was deported in 1929, eventually settling in Mexico in 1937. He would be assassinated by a Soviet agent with an ice axe in 1940. Stalin took advantage of Lenin’s personality cult by having Lenin’s body embalmed and kept on display in Moscow, against his own wish to be buried in Petrograd by his mother. Stalin portrayed himself as Lenin’s successor and the heir of Leninist ideology, which he used as an excuse to eliminate rivals.
Stalin ended the NEP in 1928, replacing it with the first Five-Year Plan, an economic policy that rapidly industrialized the USSR from the top down. Extensive forced labor was essential for this plan with the NKVD-run (the NKVD was a secret police agency) Gulag system establishing prison camps in the far north and Siberia to harness the vast resources there. This Five-Year Plan also collectivized Soviet agriculture, which led to massive famines, particularly one in Ukraine that killed somewhere between 3.5 and 5 million Ukrainians. Known as the Holodomor, this famine is considered a genocide by many countries and historians. Though it came at the cost of millions of lives and enormous state repression, the first Five-Year Plan was remarkably successful at industrializing the Soviet Union. As a result, similar Five-Year plans would continue to be the backbone of the Soviet economy for decades to come.
Stalin would continue to eliminate rivals and potential enemies within the party throughout the 1930s, imprisoning and executing thousands of Communist Party members and military officers in the 1936–38 Great Purge. The Soviets signed Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, before the German invasion of Poland, agreeing to divide Eastern Europe with Nazi Germany. Soviet forces occupied eastern Poland soon after the German invasion of the country. In 1940, with the backdrop of German invasions across Europe and the beginning of World War Two, the USSR occupied the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, making them into socialist republics within the Union. The Soviets also invaded Finland in the 1939–40 Winter War, although they were only able to annex small territories from Finland as they failed to conquer the country. This war, though not officially a defeat, cost hundreds of thousands of lives for very little gain. It painted the Soviet Red Army in a negative light, making them appear very weak.
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany began Operation Barbarossa, its invasion of the Soviet Union. The ultimate goal of this invasion? The murder of tens of millions of people and enslavement of many more, turning all of Eastern Europe into Nazi colonies. This was not a war like any other, this was a war of extermination. Though initially suffering enormous losses in 1941 with German forces besieging Leningrad (the new name for Petrograd) and coming within miles of Moscow itself, the Germans were ultimately repelled. After a Soviet victory in the Battle of Moscow (30 September 1941–7 January 1942), a war of attrition began as the Germans were slowly beaten back. Although the Eastern Front is another war requiring its own article, to keep things brief, the Soviets defeated the Germans in a series of enormously of bloody counteroffensives over the next three years, taking Berlin in the Spring of 1945.
The Eastern Front of WWII, known in the Soviet Union as the “Great Patriotic War,” killed around 40 million people, soldiers and civilians alike. The enormous cost of World War Two is another experience that left a lasting scar on the Russian national psyche. When Stalin died on March 5th, 1953, the Soviet Union stood as one of two superpowers (the other being the United States), with enormous global influence, communist puppet states across Eastern Europe, and a growing nuclear arsenal. The Cold War with the United States dominated the following decades of Soviet foreign policy, a story you are likely at least somewhat familiar with.
Stalin was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who pursued a more moderate policy of de-Stalinization and reformed the Soviet Union from a totalitarian dictatorship to a somewhat less authoritarian one-party state. Khruschev led the country until he was removed from power and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964. Brezhnev presided over a period of stagnation and a shift away from better relations with the West under Khrushchev. Brezhnev also leaned into Russian nationalism, emphasizing the sacrifice and victory of the “Great Patriotic War.” Brezhnev was briefly succeeded by Konstantin Chernenk in 1984 until his death in 1985. Chernenk was replaced by Mikhail Gorbachev, a cautious reformist.
Gorbachev’s reign was dominated by his policies of Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (transparency) which sought to reform the ailing Soviet economy and authoritarian political system respectively. Perestroika called for a socialist market economy not unlike Lenin’s NEP while Glasnost involved relaxing censorship and allowing the Soviet people a better understanding of what was happening in their government. Glasnost in particular led to issues as people began to question whether or not the Communist Party deserved to control the government alone. By 1989, the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe began to crumble as the communist governments in these countries were replaced by liberal democracies. Although the Soviet Union attempted to reform itself into a new Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics, an attempted coup by Communist Party hardliners in August of 1991 was the point of no return as countries, beginning with Ukraine, now demanded independence. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved and replaced by 15 independent states, the largest of which is the Russian Federation of today.
The Russian Federation: From the Fall of the Soviet Union to the Invasion of Ukraine (1991–2023)
As the socialist command economy of the Soviet Union was replaced by free market capitalism overnight, former Communist Party government officials with the means to do so quickly bought up many of the formerly state-owned industries. As a result, Russia’s wealth was very rapidly placed into the hands of a few powerful oligarchs. Russia’s new President, Boris Yeltsin, was a controversial man, to say the least. To some, he was the man who liberalized Russia, to others, he was a corrupt man who killed Russian democracy in its infancy. By the mid-90s, Yeltsin was deeply unpopular in Russia and was almost guaranteed to be voted out in the upcoming 1996 Presidential Election. However, Yeltsin managed to win this election by gaining the support and funding of several wealthy oligarchs. By 1999, Yeltsin was in poor health and resigned in favor of a relatively little-known official by the name of Vladimir Putin.
Putin had been a KGB agent based in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and had been working his way up the Russian political ladder since 1990 as a Saint Petersburg politician. By 1998 he was director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor of the KGB. In 1999, he was appointed acting Prime Minister before replacing Yeltsin as President on December 31st the same year. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian people tried to fill the ideological void left by communism with a number of beliefs. Some became monarchists, others Orthodox Christian conservatives, and still more clung to communism. As President, Putin and his United Russia Party crammed all of these ideas into one platform. This bizarre coalition is ultimately authoritarian, nationalist, and conservative, but incorporates beliefs and concepts from across Russian history, from Holy Russia and the Third Rome to the personality cults of Lenin and Stalin to the Great Patriotic War. He has aligned himself with Russia’s wealthy oligarchs and returned to the ancient alliance of church and state through his close political alliance with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow.
Putin today has managed to cling to power from his early popularity and revitalization of the Russian economy in the early 2000s. Throughout his rule, Putin has waged several wars and military occupations from the Second Chechen War of 1999–2000, the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, the 2014 Annexation of Crimea, and support of pro-Russia separatists in Eastern Ukraine since 2014. However, his most recent escapade, the 2022 invasion of Ukraine has been his deadliest yet. Putin has used his own twisted version of Russian history to justify waging wars for decades. He uses the memory of the tragedy of the Eastern Front to justify an unjustifiable war, comparing the Nazis to Ukrainians and NATO without any real basis. He would have the Russian people believe that a democratic system is impossible in Russia, but history shows otherwise. From the early republic in Novogorod to democratization attempts under the Russian monarchy to the failure of democracy in the 1990s, it isn’t Russians preventing democracy, but their autocratic rulers who have the most to lose from such a system.
Sources
Figes, Orlando. The Story of Russia. Metropolitan Books, 2022.
Hosking, Geoffrey A. Russian History: A Very Short Introduction, 2012.
Millar, James R. Encyclopedia of Russian History. MacMillan Reference Library, 2004.
