It’s hard to describe Russia without writing about its history. Since Americans aren’t taught the history of Russia and since we have an attention span that only tolerates short bursts of pithy, pointed information, I’ll try to give a quick cocktail party version of Russian history in its entirety. (Note: There will be simplifications, omissions, and embarrassing mistakes but since I’m mostly American I can withstand being horribly wrong and fix it later.)
Pre-1000’s
Eastern Slavs and the Finno-Ugirc people live in the area. Rurik becomes king and unites the tribes in 862.
In 988, the pagan prince Vladimir, known for his 800 wives and general cruelty, goes shopping for one religion to unite his people. He doesn’t like the dietary restrictions of the Jews and Muslims. He likes the Catholics fine but falls in love with the Hagia Sophia and its rituals. Orthodox Christianity wins. Onion domes (made pointy keep the snow from imploding the domes) begin popping up all over the Slavic regions.
14th -15th Century
The Rurik family (known for a series of terrible Ivans) is in power, fighting with each other as they fight their archenemies, the Poles, and Swedes. Moscow becomes a cultural center.
St. Basil (of Red Square fame) hangs out in the Kremlin. He’s a holy fool, a seer, and a simple man often portrayed in rags. He makes many predictions, which come true. He predicts Ivan the Terrible will kill his only son. He does, effectively ending the Rurik kings reign.
The “time of trouble” comes. A series of imposters claiming to be the heir to the throne come and go (one dramatically via a cannon).
16th Century
A new ruling family is sought. The nobles chose a distant relative to the Ruriks, a 17-year-old boy who is studying to be a monk. His father is head of the church of Russia. He is Michael, and he becomes the first Romanov tsar.
The peasants revolt every few years and finally the Romanov’s make all the peasants serfs (aka slaves) for the nobility.
17th Century
A few decades later, Michael’s grandson, Peter is born (1672). It’s a messy family story with Peter’s father having two wives and a dozen kids. Peter’s elder brother, Ivan, is either retarded or deformed (not sure which) but the nobles decide to crown both of them. Their older sister Sophia has queenly aspirations of her own, but she’s eventually sent to a convent when she tries to have Peter killed. Ivan dies and Peter I is crowned the tsar.
Peter is a tall, strapping fellow — either handsome or ghastly in appearance depending on the account — but he is a true visionary (and a ruthless crackpot). He is the first leader (1682-1725) of Russia to visit the Western world and he loves it. Not just a little. He decides to emulate the West in every way and fundamentally change the way Russia sees itself. For the first time, he asks Russia to emulate and blend in with the rest of the world. He hires Italians and French designers to built palaces. He buys Dutch art. He forces all the Russian nobility to shave their Orthodox beards and dress in the French fashion of the day. Out go the fur hats, in comes the brocade, wigs, and Louis XIV frills.
The tension between going “Western” and closing the proverbial doors to the outside world will continue.
Russia is now the biggest country in the world, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific and Peter sees a chance to get more land and more trade by gaining access to the Gulf of Finland.
He has a war with Sweden, wins, and in 1703 he founds St. Petersburg on the Gulf. He loves the landscape because it reminds him of the Netherlands, his favorite place. He wants to build a kind of Amsterdam on the banks of the Neva River. So he does. He digs canals and creates 47 interconnecting islands. Then he builds some fantastic digs. He hires Italians to build it. The Winter Palace (now the Hermitage Museum) has a view of the Neva and a plaza designed by Italians which is so grand it makes most European capitals take notice.
The formerly swamplands are built upon with rows and rows of orderly merchant homes and palaces. During this time, the tax for entering the city was stone. BYO rocks. And serfs. Russia doesn’t need money or industry since they’ve got a built-in labor force. The whole city is built for free by the serfs.
Peter makes St. Petersburg is the new capital of Russia. It’s built in ten years and it quickly rivals the European capitals as the hippest spot in the 18th century.
Peter marries young and can’t stand his wife. When off battling Sweden, he meets Sophia, “a spoil of war,” a Lithuanian washerwoman who was captured by one of Peter’s generals. Peter is enamored. He sends his old wife to the convent makes Sophia his new wife, changing her name to Catherine I.
Peter builds Catherine Palace (aka The Summer Palace), Peterhof and the rest of the city. He starts Russia’s first Navy, the first scientific academies and sends serfs to learn to paint like the Italians. It’s a Russian renaissance.
He’s also cruel, loves to party with dwarves and has a mean sense of humor. On the eve of finding out his wife had been cheating on him, he dies from his chronic kidney disease.
His wife, Catherine I, rules for a few years but no one likes her. She’s a Lithuania washerwoman after all! She dies and Anna, Peter’s niece, takes the throne for a short time. She also has a penchant for dwarves and cruel practical jokes.
(For example, she allegedly builds an icehouse, including ice sheets and ice pillows and demands a royal couple spend the night in the frozen bedroom after their marriage. They nearly die of frostbite.)
18th Century
After Anna dies in 1742, Elizabeth I, Peter’s daughter, outmaneuvers her cousins to take over power.
Elizabeth is not only tsarina; she’s the queen of Baroque. There’s nothing about being too rich, too thin or too grand for this tsarina. She adds more gilt and lacquer to all of her homes including the Winter Palace, the Summer Palace (Catherine Palace) and Peterhof. She dies with 10,000 dresses in her closet (who knows how many shoes).
She nurtures her nephew, Peter II, in the hopes that he will follow her as the next tsar. By most accounts, Peter is weak and weird. None of the nobles like him but they do like his wife, the German princess, Catherine II. After Elizabeth dies, Peter rules for a short time until he is killed — mostly likely with the help of his wife.
Catherine II, was a beloved administrator and she rules with her lover, Grigory Orlov (coming soon as an Angelina Joie movie). She died and there was a succession of “firsts:” Paul, Alexander then Nicholas.
Nobles killed Paul I in his own home, after his attempt to legislate freeing the serfs.
Alexander I was notable for defeating Napoleon by burning and pillaging his own people’s villages ahead of the French. Even the French were shocked. Not even an invading army could do as much harm as the tsars could do to their own. And Nicolas I was notable for his love of all things army and his desire to turn away from the west into Orthodoxy and Autocracy. .
19th Century
Nicholas I begat Alexander II (who tried to embrace the a new way of thinking), who fought the Crimean war and finally freed the serfs in the mid-1860’s, about the same time we were freeing our slaves. He was the most liberal of all the tsars and was working to liberalize Russian laws, when he was killed by a bomb by local anarchists who felt his reforms were too slow.
The Church of the Spilt Blood, which was build by his son, Alexander III, immortalizes the place of his death.
Alexander III went backwards. He tried to turn back reforms and strengthened autocratic rule, which in the 19th century was the wrong way to go. He died at 49, leaving his eldest son, Nicolas II to be the last tsar.
Nicholas II was never suited to ruling by his own account. He was intelligent, kind and shy and not much of a leader. His wife, Alexandra, was no help either. As the daughter of a German ruler and the granddaughter of the England’s Queen Victoria, she was a liability in World War I. Plus, she followed a religious nut named Rasputin who gave her political advice and medicine for her hemophiliac son, Alexis.
20th Century
In the meantime, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and a bunch of other radical Communists were hanging out in Germany and England waiting for their chance to return to Russia and overthrow the government.
The German government, seeking an end to the War, sent Lenin back Russia on a train to stir up trouble and weaken Russia’s power, with the hopes the nobility would be overthrown.
It worked. Nicholas II abdicated in 1917, but it was too little, too late for the Bolsheviks and the Russian people. He and Alexandra, their four daughters, and a son were all shot by revolutionaries.
After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks moved the capital to Moscow. Lenin opened up Peterhof, Catherine Palace and the Winter Palace to the people to show them what they had been missing.
He “invited” the nobles to “give” their massive art collections to the state. They complied (and then were sent to exile or the Gulag). He also started trading “treasures for tractors” to help get the Russian economy moving and to bring food to the workers’ tables.
Everything became state-owned. Everything. Restaurants, land, homes. No one owned anything, except the state. This was both comforting and depressing.
Lenin died in 1924, leaving no clear successor, but he did beg his comrades not to elect Stalin. He thought Stalin was crazy. They elected Stalin anyway. Stalin ruled with fear and intimidation, often sending tens of thousands of people to the Gulag for no reason. According to some books, he was responsible for over 40,000,000 Russian deaths during his rule.
In 1941, Russia faced World War II, a war that hit the country hard. Some accounts say they lost 9 million people in the war, far more than any other country.
The Nazi’s came within 23 miles of Moscow and they attempted to eradicate St. Petersburg in a brutal 900 day siege that killed somewhere between 600,000 and 2 million people.
The War ended when Stalin made a pact with Roosevelt. Together, they joined to defeat Hitler.
After the war, Stalin took over half of Germany and most of the Eastern Block countries. The new country was born, called the Soviet Union. The world entered a Cold War.
For almost 40 years, no one came into Russia and the Soviet Union and no one came out. The Russians say little about their lives except that they are better than the West. They do send a man into space first.
In 1957, Stalin became ill. He believed his doctors were too slow to cure him so he had them all killed. This backfired when he became ill again. Fearing their own demise, his doctors did nothing. Stalin died.
A new set of leaders take power: Krushev (who gets ousted), Breshnev (who dies in office), Chernekyo, Andropov, then Gorbachov all took turns leading the Soviet Union.
Depending on whom you talk to, Gorbachov either saved Russia or ruined it. He dismantled the Soviet Union and introduced a loosening of Communism. The market economy was introduced and for the the dreaded “D” word was spoken again on Russian soil: democracy.
For the first time, people could own their homes (if they were lucky to be living in one the state had given them) and own businesses (if they were lucky enough to know what a market economy was). Russians could travel (if they were lucky enough to have the money). Foreigners could come in.
Everyone saw what they had been missing and it was clear to everyone: Russia was missing a lot. Russia’s bright future seemed far away.
Yeltsin booted Gorbachov (who went on to a rich speaking career in the United States). The new oligarchs cheated their way into fortunes. Yeltsin drank too much. He hired Putin and Putin replaced him.
That was 15 years ago.
Now
Today, Putin is taking over countries and threatening those who disagree with him. He is chasing out foreign influence and any agent he deems destructive out of Russia. He’s daring his adversaries to challenge him. His last adversary was shot on a bridge leaving Red Square.
He is enjoying big political demonstrations of armies and war machinery. People are afraid of what might come.
That’s most of what I know, but I am also fully aware that like all our Russian guides have told us: there’s always what happened, the official story, the local legend, and what the outside world thinks. And none of these stories match.
Russian history is still yet to be written.
Cecilia Najar 