More About Russia ( Past History )

 The History of Russia begins with that of the Eastern Slavs. The traditional beginning
of Russian history is 862 A.D. Kievan Rus', the first united East Slavic state, was founded in 882.

 The state adopted Christianity from the
Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning with the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that
defined Slavic culture for the next millennium.
 Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state because of the Mongol invasion of Rus' in 1237– 1240 and the death of about half the population
of Rus.

 After the 13th century, Moscow became a
cultural center of Moscovia. By the 18th century, the Tsardom of Russia had become the huge Russian Empire, stretching from the Polish border eastward to the Pacific Ocean. Expansion
in the western direction sharpened Russia's
awareness of its separation from much of the rest of Europe and shattered the isolation in
which the initial stages of expansion had
occurred. Successive regimes of the 19th
century responded to such pressures with a
combination of halfhearted reform and
repression. Peasant revolts were common, and all were fiercely suppressed.

 Russian serfdom was abolished in 1861 , but the peasant fared
poorly and often turned to revolutionary
pressures. In following decades reforms efforts such as the Stolypin reforms, the constitution of
1906 , and State Duma attempted to open and liberalize the economy and political system, but the tsars refused to relinquish autocratic rule or share their power.

 The Russian Revolution in 1917 was triggered by a combination of economic breakdown, war- weariness, and discontent with the autocratic system of government, and it first brought a coalition of liberals and moderate socialists to
power, but their failed policies led to seizure of power by the communist Bolsheviks on 25
October. Between 1922 and 1991, the history of Russia is essentially the history of the Soviet Union, effectively an ideologically based state
which was roughly conterminous with the
Russian Empire before the Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk .

 The approach to the building of
socialism, however, varied over different periods in Soviet history, from the mixed economy and diverse society and culture of the 1920s to the command economy and repressions of the Joseph Stalin era to the "era of stagnation" in
the 1980s. From its first years, government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communists, as the Bolsheviks called
themselves, beginning in March 1918.
By the mid-1980s, with the weaknesses of its
economic and political structures becoming
acute, Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on major
reforms, which led to the overthrow of the
Communist party and the breakup of the USSR,
leaving Russia again on its own and marking the start of the history of post-Soviet Russia .

 The Russian Federation began in January 1992 as the legal successor to the USSR. Russia retained
its nuclear arsenal but lost its superpower
status. Scrapping the socialist central planning and state ownership of property of the socialist era, new leaders, led by President Vladimir Putin ,
took political and economic power after 2000 and engaged in an energetic foreign policy.

 Russia's treatment of Ukraine led to severe economic sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union.