Russia

A Historical Introduction from Kievan Rus' to the Present

Christopher J. Ward, John M. Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000415391
• Edition: 9
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

This lucid account of Russian and Soviet history presents major trends and events from Kievan Rus' to Vladimir Putin's presidency in the twenty-first century.

Directly addressing controversial topics, this book looks at issues such as the impact of the Mongol conquest, the paradoxes of Peter the Great, the "inevitability" of the 1917 Revolution, the Stalinist terror, and the Gorbachev reform effort. This new ninth edition has been updated to include a discussion of Russian participation in the War in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, Russia's role in the Syrian civil war, the rise of opposition figure Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin's confirmation as "president for life, " recent Russian relations with the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the European Union as well as contemporary social and cultural trends. Distinguished by its brevity and supplemented with substantially updated suggested readings that feature new scholarship on Russia and a thoroughly updated index, this essential text provides balanced coverage of all periods of Russian history and incorporates economic, social, and cultural developments as well as politics and foreign policy.

Suitable for undergraduates as well as the general reader with an interest in Russia, this text is a concise, single volume on one of the world's most significant lands.

1 Introduction

Ancient Russia and Kievan Rus’

DOI: 10.4324/9781003015512-1

The Geography of Russia

It is difficult to comprehend the vast expanse of territory of Russia during its long history.¹ In order to understand the enormity of this space, we should be aware that this gigantic region once covered one-sixth of the land surface of the entire Earth, across Eurasia from the Pacific Ocean in the east to the Baltic Sea (an arm of the Atlantic Ocean) in the west (see Map 1.1).

Six thousand miles and eleven time zones from east to west, three thousand miles from north to south, with the world’s longest coastline (much of it along the Arctic Ocean), Russia both past and present contains every type of terrain: deserts, semitropical beaches, inland seas, sweeping semiarid plains, rugged mountains, treeless grasslands known as steppe, thick forests, long rivers, and the icebound tundra of the far north.

The size of Russia creates special challenges for the people living there. How can such a huge territory be managed and its riches extracted and used efficiently? How can its inhabitants stay in touch with one another and develop a sense of common identity and purpose? How can power be exercised and the state administered over such vast distances? What should be the balance between control from the center and local decision making? Should new industry be developed where a majority of the people live but where there are few resources, or where there exist large quantities of raw materials but few inhabitants?

In addition, the great extent of Russia’s landmass produced important strategic consequences over the centuries. Paradoxically, the area was both hard to conquer and hard to defend. The peoples living in the region at various times have coped with enemies on three, four, and occasionally even five fronts. Thus, the governments of the area have had to allocate much of their effort and resources to defending large territories. However, the opponents of Russia often had trouble invading and occupying the region. Although the Mongols succeeded in conquering and ruling much of what is now Russia from the 1200s to the 1400s, the Poles, the Swedes, the Turks, the French under Napoleon, and the Germans twice in the twentieth century had less luck, turned back in part by the enormous distances to be traversed.

Map 1.1 Russia and other post-Soviet states

In assessing the influence of Russia’s natural environment on its history, we find that its location is as important as its size. For example, if you lived in Washington, DC, and were suddenly transported by magic to a Russian city with a comparable latitude, where do you think you would end up? In Moscow? You would miss Russia entirely because it lies within latitudes parallel to those of Canada and Alaska. St. Petersburg, for example, is slightly farther north than Juneau, Alaska.

This northerly position on the Earth’s surface causes recurring hardships for the citizens of Russia. In many areas, winters are long and cold, and the growing season for food is short. Also, much of the land is so far north that it cannot be farmed, and living there is difficult. Consequently, Russia was never rich agriculturally, despite its huge size.

Although situated in the northern part of the great Eurasian landmass, Russia has during its long history stretched south, east, and west so that it touched most of continental Asia, the Middle East, and Europe (see Map 1.1). As a result, the region has always been a crossroads of cultures and ideas. Russia was affected by European, Asian, and Islamic civilizations and absorbed aspects of all of them. In turn, and increasingly in the past two centuries, Russia has influenced (and on occasion dominated) its neighbors.

In particular, Russia’s central location in Eurasia has contributed strongly to its mix of cultures and values today and to its important role in contemporary world affairs. Although linked to both Asia and the West, Russian society has evolved in distinct and complex ways. It need not be characterized as exotic, Asian, or merely an offshoot of Western civilization. Russia’s unique history has produced a modern society unlike any other. As such, the region must be understood on its own terms.

Partly because of its northerly location and partly because it is situated far from the major oceans, Russia has a forbidding climate in most regions: very hot and dry in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter, with a spring marked by deep mud that makes travel on unpaved roads almost impossible. Since most of the rain comes across Europe from the Atlantic Ocean, it peters out as it moves over the Russian agricultural plain from west to east. Some of the best soil receives insufficient rainfall, and almost all the farming in Central Asia requires irrigation. As a result, less than 15 percent of Russia’s land is used for growing food, another feature that limits the country’s agricultural potential and strength.

In some ways, Russia was well protected, especially by the frozen expanse of the Arctic Ocean to the north and by some of the highest mountains in the world to the southeast (see Map 1.1). Yet along its borders in the east, the southwest, and the west, Russia had virtually no natural defenses and at different times suffered invasions from all these points of the compass.

Moreover, the heart of Russia was one vast plain, broken only by the Ural Mountains, which are not very high and, in any case, do not reach all the way to the Caspian Sea. The impact of this plain on the area’s development was double-edged. Russia and adjacent lands often lay open to attack across this terrain, but the extent of the plain made it easy for the Russian state to expand and bring surrounding nationalities under its rule. One can easily visualize horsemen, traders, and modern armies moving back and forth across these flat expanses.

But Russians and other peoples who lived in the region traveled as much by water as by land. Although the Russian Empire was largely landlocked and had limited access to the sea—the Arctic shore opens primarily on ice, and the Baltic and Black Seas and the Sea of Japan in East Asia lead to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans only through narrow straits—much of Russia and neighboring lands possess a widespread system of interconnecting rivers, “the roads that run,” as folk wisdom puts it. Until about one hundred and fifty years ago, when railroads and later motor vehicles and airplanes appeared, Russians and other peoples moved extensively by boat, up and down the rivers, which generally flow in a north–south or south–north direction, or on the tributaries that touch each other along an east–west axis. Thus, the earliest inhabitants, using river routes, traveled to and traded with Europeans and Vikings to the northwest, Byzantine Greek Christians to the southwest, and Asian merchants and artisans to the south. Later, the Russian Empire’s expansion across Siberia, led by fur trappers and traders, was carried out primarily by water. Even in modern times, river transport plays an important role in moving goods and people throughout the region (see Figure 1.1).

Russia possesses rich natural resources, but much of this wealth, such as oil, natural gas, and other abundant minerals, was exploited only recently. For most of its history, the peoples of Russia were quite poor, and they struggled to survive and improve their way of life while supporting, with limited resources, a government-organized defense against recurrent enemies. Unfortunately, carrying the burden of the state and the army often meant that people lived in harsh poverty. In the second half of the twentieth century, there was significant progress in raising the quality of life.

The Peoples of Russia and the Former Soviet Union

The most striking fact about the population of the states of Russia and the lands Russia once controlled is the existence of some 125 national groups, of which over 20 included more than one million people. A wide variety of religions and cultures coexist within the borders of Russia and neighboring states. Jewish peoples generally spoke Russian and intermixed with the rest of the population throughout European Russia (the modern states of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus). In the twentieth century, non-ethnically Russian groups developed a sense of ethnic identity and growing nationalist aspirations, which helped to create the pressures that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union (also known as the USSR²) and the birth of fifteen post-Soviet states,³ including today’s Russia.

Of the approximately 146 million people living in the Russian Federation today, the largest national groups are ethnic Russians⁴ who represent around 81 percent of Russia’s population, Tatars (an ethnically Turkic people who speak the Tatar language and mostly live in Tatarstan, a republic located within European Russia), Ukrainians, and Bashkirs, who are also Turkic and reside mostly in European Russia. Geographic and demographic factors influenced the development of Russian society. A word of caution is in order, however. History is made by individuals in a society interacting with each other and their neighbors. Thus, it would be an oversimplification to conclude that primarily Russian institutions, such as a centralized authoritarian government, or traditional Russian values, such as a concern for the group rather than the individual, resulted primarily from the harsh conditions of the region’s natural environment.

Figure 1.1 Barge traffic in the 1890s on the Volga River, an important commercial artery in the region from the earliest times

(Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-DIG-prok-02445)

The Formation of Kievan Rus’

Kievan Rus’ emerged in the late 800s or early 900s. Briefly centered in the city of Novgorod in what is now northern Russia and then for several hundred years in the city of Kiev on the Dnieper River in what is now Ukraine, Kievan Rus’ was a loose confederation whose origin remains unclear. During the late 700s and 800s, traders and warriors known as Rus’ (the term from which the word “Russia” derives) participated in commercial activity in northern Russia and along the upper Volga River. Most likely, the Rus’ were Swedish Vikings, but they intermingled and interacted with local groups of Finns, Balts, Bulgars, and Slavs. They sought silver and luxury goods from the east, for which they traded furs and even slaves. In 860, an expedition of Rus’ reached Constantinople, but regular contact with the Byzantine Greek civilization based in that city developed only later.

Figure 1.2 Scythian gold stag

(Courtesy of Dr. Daniel Wood)

The most detailed historical source, The Primary Chronicle, compiled by monks in the eleventh century, recounts that since there was no order among the Slavic tribes in the 800s, they invited a Varangian (a term for Swedish Viking) named Riurik and his two brothers to come and rule over them. But this chronicle was written several hundred years later, partly for the purpose of legitimizing Riurik’s alleged descendants’ claims to power, making the story suspect in itself. In addition, a growing body of archeological and other evidence suggests that the role of the Varangians in Russia was a good deal more complex than the picture The Primary Chronicle paints.

As long-distance traders, the Varangians were well acquainted with the trading routes from Scandinavia to the east and to the Byzantine capital at Constantinople that passed through today’s Russia and Ukraine, primarily down the Dnieper River and across the Black Sea. Thus, the Varangians, though occasionally plundering and conquering as they did in Western Europe a short time later, entered the region primarily as traders and mercenaries. It is logical to assume that in these roles they worked closely with local Slavic leaders to increase order and security, to protect trade routes, and to encourage regular payment of tribute by rural peoples to the commercial and military leaders of the towns in the area. Thus, although in certain times and places the Slavs and Varangians clashed, and on occasion the Varangians may even have attempted to assert political control over Slavic groups, the Varangians and local leaders probably cooperated much more often in pursuit of common objectives. The most sensible conclusion is that the Varangians worked with Slavic chieftains to create a loose confederation of local states known as Kievan Rus’.

This first civilization is important to an understanding of Russian civilization for several reasons. In Kievan Rus’, the fundamental characteristics of Russian culture and religion took root. Kievan Rus’ also introduced basic and lasting political ideas and social institutions. Finally, it created the tradition of the region as a force in international affairs and as a nexus between Europe and Asia.

How Did the Peoples of Kievan Rus’ Make a Living?

Kievan Rus’ lasted from the late 800s to the early 1200s. At its greatest extent, the Kievan confederation was long and narrow. In the eleventh century, it stretched for thousands of miles from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, including a band of territory of varying width both east and west of its main axis on the Dnieper River (see Map 1.2). A general estimate puts its maximum population at about seven or eight million, of whom fewer than a million lived in towns and cities. The largest cities, such as Kiev, probably contained tens of thousands of people, but in most of the more than two hundred fortified centers that have been identified, the population was undoubtedly fewer than five thousand.

More than 85 percent of the people lived on the land as farmers, hunters and trappers, beekeepers, and herdsmen. Most of the farming was small in scale and used primitive implements, such as wooden plows, though some iron plows also existed. Most of what peopl...