Once the preeminent republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.; commonly known as the Soviet Union), Russia became an independent country after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Russia is a land of superlatives.
In the Russian Tsardom, the word Russia replaced the old name Rus' in official documents, though the names Rus' and Russian land were still common and synonymous to it, and often appeared in the form Great Russia (Russian: Великая Россия), which is more typical of the 17th century, whereas the state was also known as ...
Russian Kingdom (1547-1721), Russian Empire (1721) -1917), Russian Republic (1917), Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1917-1922, since 1922 - part of the USSR)
Thereafter, the state was called, “Kievan Rus”. Mostly furs, slaves, and wax, were traded for Arabian silver, as well as Byzantine luxury goods.
The traditional start-date of specifically Russian history is the establishment of the Rus' state in the north in 862, ruled by Varangians. Staraya Ladoga and Novgorod became the first major cities of the new union of immigrants from Scandinavia with the Slavs and Finns.
The Russians were formed from East Slavic tribes, and their cultural ancestry is based in Kievan Rus'. Genetically, the majority of Russians are identical to their East and West Slavic counterparts, unlike Northern Russians, who belong to the Northern European Baltic gene pool.
Veliky Novgorod – the Birthplace of Russian Statehood
Veliky Novgorod was the first to introduce Russia to running a republican state, and its historical example has always attracted the supporters of democratic development in our country. A visit to the Rurik's Gorodishche (Settlement) is not to be missed.
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian: Українська Радянська Соціалістична Республіка, Ukrainska Radianska Sotsialistychna Respublika; Russian: Украинская Советская Социалистическая Республика), abbreviated as the Ukrainian SSR and also known as Soviet Ukraine, was one of the constituent republics of the ...
Defeat in the Crimean War further reduced Russian interest in this region. Russia offered to sell Alaska to the United States in 1859, believing the United States would off-set the designs of Russia's greatest rival in the Pacific, Great Britain.
The Russian colonization of Alaska lasted less than a century but in that time produced a rich history of enduring importance.
Since its imperial times, it has been both a great power and a regional power. Throughout most of the Soviet-era, the Soviet Union was one of the world's two superpowers. However, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation as its successor state lost its superpower status.
At the third meeting of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 25 January 1918, the unrecognised state was renamed the Russian Soviet Republic.
During the ninth and tenth centuries, a massive state grew to dominate much of Eastern Europe. Ancestors to Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, the Kievan Rus were a combination of Slavic and Viking influences.
The first known people to set foot on Russian territory were called the Cimmerians. They ruled between 1000 and 700 BCE and were followed by the Scythians in 700 BCE. The Scythian nomads established a military state and defeated the Persians, but were nonetheless conquered by the Sarmatians in 3 BCE.
By the early 18th century, Russia had vastly expanded through conquest, annexation, and the efforts of Russian explorers, developing into the Russian Empire, which remains the third-largest empire in history.
Prints and Photographs Division. On March 30, 1867, the United States reached an agreement to purchase Alaska from Russia for a price of $7.2 million. The Treaty with Russia was negotiated and signed by Secretary of State William Seward and Russian Minister to the United States Edouard de Stoeckl.
Modern Russia derives its name from the Kevian Rus', the ancestors of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The name Rus' comes from an Old Norse word for 'the men who row. '
In 1741 the Russians sent the Dane Vitus Bering and the Russian Aleksey Chirikov on a voyage of discovery. After their ships became separated in a storm, Chirikov discovered several of the eastern islands, while Bering discovered several of the western islands.
Southern Siberia was part of the Mongols' khanate of the Golden Horde from the 10th to the mid-15th century.
The Russian Empire. Russia in the 19th century was both a multilingual and a multireligious empire. Only about half the population was at the same time Russian by language and Orthodox by religion.
The area that is today the country of Russia has been inhabited by people for thousands of years. The first modern state in Russia was founded in 862 by King Rurik of the Rus, who was made the ruler of Novgorod.
The core ideological justification for Russian expansion into Siberia stemmed from the interpretation that the legal incorporation of the Khanate of Sibir into the Russian realm gave Russia legal sovereignty over the entirety of the territory stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean to the east.
The Amur Annexation was the annexation of the southeast corner of Siberia by the Russian Empire in 1858–1860 through a series of unequal treaties forced upon the Qing dynasty of China.