A brief history of Russia

A BRIEF HISTORY

OF RUSSIA

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i-xxiv_BH-Russia_fm.indd ii 5/7/08 4:03:06 PM

A BRIEF HISTORY

OF RUSSIA

MICHAEL KORT

Boston University

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A Brief History of Russia

The author has made every effort to clear permissions for material excerpted in this book.

electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or

retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact:

Facts On File, Inc.

An imprint of Infobase Publishing

132 West 31st Street

New York NY 10001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kort, Michael, 1944–

A brief history of Russia / Michael Kort.

p. cm.—(Brief history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8160-7112-8

ISBN-10: 0-8160-7112-8

1. Russia—History. 2. Soviet Union—History. I. Title.

DK40.K687 2007

947—dc22 2007032723

The author and Facts On File have made every effort to contact copyright holders. The publisher

will be glad to rectify, in future editions, any errors or omissions brought to their notice. We thank

the following presses for permission to reproduce the material listed.

Oxford University Press, London, for permission to reprint portions of Mikhail Speransky’s 1802

memorandum to Alexander I from The Russia Empire, 1801–1917 (1967) by Hugh Seton-Watson.

Oxford University Press, London, for permission to reprint material from A History of Russia (second

University of California Press, Berkeley, for permission to reprint portions of the edict of July

3, 1826, from Nicholas I and Offi cial Nationality, 1825–1855 (1967) by Nicholas V. Riasanovsky.

Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., for permission to reprint portions of “The State of

Russia under the Present Czar” by John Perry from Seven Britons in Imperial Russia, 1698–1812

Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA), New York, for permission to reprint portions of “Tale

of the Destruction of Riazan” and “Zadonshchina” from Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales

(revised and enlarged edition), edited by Serge A. Zenkovsky, translated by Serge A. Zenkovsky,

M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, N.Y., for permission to reprint portions of The Soviet Colossus: History and

Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for

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in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755.

You can fi nd Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfi le.com

Text design by Joan M. McEvoy

Cover design by Semadar Megged

Maps by Sholto Ainslie

Printed in the United States of America

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This book is printed on acid-free paper and contains 30 percent postconsumer recycled content.

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For Carol, and our fi rst 40 years together

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix

List of Maps x

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction xiii

1 Before the Russians, Kievan Rus, and Muscovite

Russia (Tenth Century b.c.e.–1462 c.e.) 1

2 Independence and Unification: The Last Rurikids

to the First Romanovs (1462–1694) 24

3 Imperial Russia: The Eras of Peter the Great and

Catherine the Great (1694–1801) 46

4 The Nineteenth-Century Crisis: The Mystic and

the Knout (1801–1855) 72

5 Reform, Reaction, and Revolution (1855–1917) 95

6 The Golden and Silver Ages: Russian Cultural

Achievement from Pushkin to World War I

(1820–1917) 125

7 Soviet Russia: Utopian Dreams and Dystopian

Realities (1917–1953) 152

8 Soviet Russia: Reform, Decline, and Collapse

(1953–1991) 194

9 Post–Soviet Russia: Yeltsin and Putin (1991–2008) 230

10 Conclusion: The Russian Riddle 247

Appendixes

1 Basic Facts about Russia 255

2 Chronology 260

3 Bibliography 274

4 Suggested Reading 279

Index 289

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List of illustrations

The taiga of Siberia xvi

Volga River in winter xvii

Lake Baikal xix

Typical winter scene in the European part of Russia xxi

St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev 10

St. Sophia Cathedral in Novgorod 11

Moscow’s Kremlin 20

The Bell Tower of Ivan the Great 30

Ivan the Terrible 33

St. Basil’s Cathedral 34

The Kazan Kremlin 36

The Bronze Horseman in St. Petersburg 53

The Winter Palace 60

Catherine the Great 63

Monument to Nicholas I 83

Crimean War battle 93

Peasants in a fi eld c. 1870 101

Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg’s main avenue c. 1901 116

October Manifesto celebration, 1905 119

Russian aviator Mikhail Effi mov 121

Duma in session 122

Aleksandr Pushkin 128

Nikolai Gogol 131

Leo Tolstoy 140

Vaslav Nijinsky 149

Vladimir Lenin 156

Anti-kulak propaganda 173

Rostov-on-Don combine factory, 1930s 176

Women factory lathe operation, c. 1940 178

Gulag labor camp 180

Joseph Stalin at the Teheran Conference in 1943 187

World War II memorial in Volgograd 189

Nikita Khrushchev 199

Sputnik model 202

Leonid Brezhnev 213

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A Brief History of russia

Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan 221

Destroyed Chernobyl nuclear reactor 223

Boris Yeltsin condemning the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev 228

Heavy automobile traffic, Moscow 233

Nevsky Prospect in modern St. Petersburg 237

Vladimir Putin 241

Pipelines for transporting oil 244

Russian dolls known as matrioshkas 248

A Kremlin tower and traffic: the old and the new in Moscow 251

List of Maps

Kievan Rus in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries 7

Moscow/Russian Expansion, 1300 to 1533 19

Russia in 1914 110

Soviet Union after World War II 191

Russian Federation 231

Ethnolinguistic Groups in the Caucasus Region 238

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Claudia Schaab of Facts On File for convincing me

to write this book and then carrying out the multiple tasks associated with being its editor with great skill, patience, and effi ciency. My

friend and colleague Robert Wexelblatt, as he has done before, read and

critiqued large parts of this book and was never too busy to discuss

writing issues during lengthy phone conversations at any hour of the

day or night. Kathleen Martin kindly critiqued the chapter on Russian

literature and culture and offered valuable suggestions and insights that

signifi cantly improved it. My wonderful daughters, Eleza and Tamara,

now adults, made sure their father “chilled out” a little as he intently

worked to meet his deadlines. Finally and foremost, my wife, Carol,

read, edited, and critiqued the entire manuscript and then again went

over everything and anything connected with it at a moment’s notice,

regardless of other demands on her time and energy. It has become

something of a cliché in acknowledgments such as these, but I really

could not have written this book without her input and help.

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xiii

Introduction

Russia’s history is an epic saga of strength, suffering, and, ultimately,

of survival. It is a tumultuous drama acted out on a vast and

violent stage millions of square miles in area, where enormous casts of

ordinary people were repeatedly conscripted for extraordinary historical scenes that gave credence to the claim that truth is stranger than

fi ction. It is a litany of extremes: extreme weather, extreme contrasts,

extreme twists of fate, extreme changes of fortune, and extreme solutions for extreme problems, all of which imposed cruel sacrifi ces on a

people who even in good times lived with hardship and in bad times

endured the intolerable. And like the heavens on the shoulders of Atlas,

Russia’s history is a huge and heavy burden that weighs down today on

a great country as it tries to overcome its past and create a society in

which its people can live freely and prosper.

The Physical Setting

The Russian Federation, as Russia is known today, is the largest country

in the world. Although considerably downsized from the days of the

Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, when the area under czarist and

subsequently Soviet control exceeded 8.5 million square miles, Russia

still encompasses an area of 6.5 million square miles. That is about oneninth of the world’s total land area, including Antarctica. Extending

more than 6,000 miles from west to east, from the Baltic Sea and the

center of Europe across all of Asia to the shores of the Pacifi c Ocean,

Russia is at once the largest country on two continents.

Russia is uniquely Eurasian. Two other countries, Turkey and

Kazakhstan, have territory in both Europe and Asia. Yet both are culturally Asian and almost entirely Asian by geography, with only a sliver

of territory in Europe. By contrast, Russia is a colossus astride both

continents. Culturally and ethnically the vast majority of its people are

European, but its historic and cultural ties with Asia are signifi cant and

enduring. Russia also stretches about 2,000 miles from north to south,

from frozen islands in the Arctic Sea to the Caucasus Mountains and the

warm shores of the Caspian Sea of southern Europe in the west and to

the Altai Mountains and Lake Baikal in the physical heartland of Asia

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF RUSSIA

xiv

in the east. It therefore is understandable how in the mid-19th century

Mikhail Pogodin, a fervent Russian nationalist and the fi rst professor of

Russian history at the University of Moscow, allowed himself to be carried away by patriotic enthusiasm when he described his native land:

Russia! What a marvelous phenomenon on the world scene!

Russia—a distance of ten thousand versts [about two-thirds

of a mile] in length on a straight line from the virtually central European river, across all of Asia and the Eastern Ocean,

down to the remote American lands! [At the time Russia

owned Alaska.] A distance of five thousand versts in width

from Persia, one of the southern Asiatic states, to the end of

the inhabited world—to the North Pole. What state can equal

it? Its half? How many can match its twentieth, its fiftieth

part? . . . Russia—a state which contains all types of soil, from

the warmest to the coldest, from the burning environs of Erivan

to icy Lapland; which abounds in all the products required for

the needs, comforts, and pleasures in life, in accordance with

the present state of development—a whole world, self-sufficient, independent, absolute. (Riasanovsky, 1969: 3)

Most of Russia is situated on the enormous Eurasian plain, the largest such feature on the globe, an expanse that begins at the Atlantic

Ocean and does not end until the uplands and mountains of Siberia

deep in Asia. Once the bottom of an ancient sea, the plain is broken

only by the Ural Mountains, a range of hills running due north/south

for more than 1,000 miles that geographers have designated the boundary between Europe and Asia. But in a practical sense these worn, geologically ancient hills are less signifi cant than they appear on a map and

have never been a barrier to human or natural forces.

Far more impressive are the snowcapped Caucasus Mountains

between the Black and Caspian Seas, which like the Urals divide

Europe from Asia. The Russian Empire won control of the Caucasus

region during the 19th century after decades of bitter fi ghting that left

a deep mark on the national psyche. The long struggle inspired works

by some of Russia’s greatest writers, including Aleksandr Pushkin (the

narrative poem “Prisoner of the Caucasus”), Mikhail Lermontov (the

novel A Hero of Our Time), and Leo Tolstoy (the novella Hadji Murat).

The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 left Russia with only the

northern part of the Caucasus region, but the struggle to maintain control there grinds on as many Chechens, the same group Tolstoy wrote

about more than 100 years ago in Hadji Murat, continue their resistance

to Russian rule.

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