Istoria Rusiei

Discuţii despre istoria ruşilor.

The Russian Federation (Russia) - 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 one ninth 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 Pacific Ocean, Russia is at once the largest country on two continents. Approximately 141 million people live in Russia, about 80 percent of whom are ethnic Russians.

Russia’s history is an epic saga of strength, suffering, and, ultimately, of survival. [...] 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 sacrifices 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.

 "A brief history of Russia" by Michael Kort

Russia! What a marvelous phenomenon on the world scene! Russia—a distance of ten thousand versts 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! 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)

Mikhail Pogodin, first professor of Russian history at the University of Moscow

- Russia’s first great city, Kiev, the “mother of Russian cities,” rose along the banks of the Dnieper River more than 1,200 years ago.

- Along the banks of the Don in 1380, Moscow’s Grand Prince Dmitry (r. 1359–89) defeated a Mongol army, the first time the Russians managed a military victory over the invaders who had conquered them in the 13th century.

- From its beginnings as a village along the Moscow River, Moscow developed into a major city between the 13th and 15th centuries. It was the core of Muscovy, the principality that during the 15th and 16th centuries broke the Mongol grip on Russia and began the job of uniting all Russians into a single state for the first time. Moscow is home to about 8.2 million people.

- St. Petersburg, built by Peter the Great and Russia’s capital from 1712 to 1918, rose as a planned city on the swampy shores of the Neva River where it flows into the Gulf of Finland. It is widely considered one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Known as Leningrad between 1924 and 1991, during World War II the city became a heroic symbol of resistance against aggression when it withstood a German siege that lasted 900 days and cost 800,000 Soviet citizens their lives. Russia’s second-largest city - St. Petersburg is home to 4.6 million people.

-Trans-Siberian Railroad is more than a railroad; it is a monument to Russian determination and ingenuity. Built between 1891 and 1915 under extraordinarily difficult conditions, with most of the work completed during the 1890s, it extends for more than 5,500 miles from Moscow to Russia’s Siberian port city of Vladivostok, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The Trans-Siberian is considered one of the great engineering achievements of the late 19th century

The Historical Framework

- Kievan Russia era dates from the ninth century, when the first Russian state
centered at Kiev emerged under a dynasty named for its semilegendary founder, Rurik, and lasted until the Mongol conquest of the 13th century.

- Muscovite Russia era dates from the Mongol conquest and its aftermath, a period when Russians were subject to foreign rule for more than two centuries. The Muscovite period extended through the expiration of the Rurikid dynasty and the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in the 17th century.

- The reign of Peter the Great marks the beginning of Russia’s imperial era. It lasted from the 1690s until March 1917, when the Romanov dynasty was overthrown and the monarchy itself abolished.

- After eight months of disorder, during which time Russian moderates struggled to establish a democratic government, a small group of militant Marxist socialists called the Bolsheviks seized power and, after a three-year civil war, consolidated their dictatorial rule over most of the defunct Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks wanted to turn Russia into a socialist society. The state they founded, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (or Soviet Union), and the socialist society they built lasted until 1991. This was the Soviet era of Russia’s history.

- Finally, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the current era began in 1992. For lack of a better term, and because the renamed Russian Federation still operates very much under the shadow of the former regime, it generally is called the post-Soviet era.