Russia historical timeline

Chronology

1. c. 882 The Varangian prince Oleg the Wise extends his control from Novgorod south along the Dnieper valley and takes Kiev, laying the foundation of Kievan Rus' — the first state to unite the East Slavic lands, ruled by the Rurik dynasty founded by the Varangian prince Rurik. The Norse called the territory Garðaríki. That a Scandinavian dynasty founded the state is a live argument rather than a settled fact in the region.
2. 988 Vladimir the Great, who ruled from 980 to 1015, spreads Christianity with his own baptism and extends it by decree to all the inhabitants of Kiev and beyond. The choice of Constantinople over Rome brought the Cyrillic alphabet and an ecclesiastical orientation eastwards, and it is the single deepest reason Russian culture developed apart from Latin Europe. Every onion dome and every icon a visitor looks at descends from this year.
3. 1237 The Mongols overrun most of Kievan Rus' between 1236 and 1238, sacking Ryazan, Yaroslavl, Pereyaslavl and Vladimir, and capture Kiev — then a city of 50,000 — in 1240, which is generally held to mark the end of the Kievan state. Principalities that escaped conquest were forced into tribute or vassalage to the Golden Horde well into the 14th century. Moscow, an unimportant town that was good at collecting that tribute, rose on the arrangement.
4. 1380 A Russian army defeats the Mongols at the Battle of Kulikovo, though demands for tribute from Russian princes continued for another century. The practical end of Mongol overlordship came later, under Ivan III, who simply stopped paying in 1480.
5. 1547 Ivan IV is crowned tsar at the age of 16, the first Tsar of all Russia, having been Grand Prince since 1533. He revised the legal code, established the Zemsky Sobor assembly and the first Russian standing army, imported the first printing press — and conducted a violent purge through Russia's first political police, the oprichniki. The pattern of reform and terror in the same reign is not incidental to how Russian history is written.
6. 1639 Russian expansion reaches the Pacific within a century of Ivan's reign, carried by fur traders across Siberia — an extension of control over roughly a third of the northern hemisphere, achieved by small parties following rivers rather than by armies. The Trans-Siberian railway later followed the same logic, and the reason Russia spans eleven time zones is this century rather than any later one.
7. 1703 Peter the Great founds Saint Petersburg on 27 May on the site of a captured Swedish fortress, naming it for the apostle. It served as capital of the Tsardom and then the Russian Empire from 1712 to 1918. The city exists to face Europe, was built on a swamp at enormous human cost, and is the physical argument of Peter's westernisation — which is why its centre looks nothing like Moscow's.
8. 1812 Napoleon's Grande Armée crosses the Neman on 24 June to force Russia into the blockade of Britain, takes Smolensk in August and fails to destroy the Russian army at Borodino, 110 kilometres west of Moscow. Kutuzov withdrew and gave up the city. Russia calls it the Patriotic War of 1812, and the naming matters: 1941 is the GREAT Patriotic War, the second of a pair.
9. 1861 The Emancipation Manifesto abolishes serfdom throughout the Russian Empire, the first and most important of Alexander II's liberal reforms, giving more than 23 million people their liberty and the full rights of free citizens — to marry without consent, to own property, to own a business. Household serfs gained freedom and no land, which is why emancipation did not settle the land question and 1917 did.
10. 1917 Two revolutions in one year end the Romanov dynasty and bring the Bolsheviks to power, and a civil war follows. The dates are the reason Russian and Western calendars disagree about them: the country was still on the Julian calendar, so the February revolution happened in March and the October revolution in November by the reckoning a visitor uses.
11. 1922 The Soviet Union is founded, and by its final years comprised 15 union republics serving as the homelands of different ethnic groups. That federal structure is what made 1991 possible: the Union dissolved along lines that already existed on the map, which is also why so many of today's borders are Soviet administrative decisions rather than older ones.
12. 1936 The Great Purge runs from 1936 to 1938, conducted largely by the NKVD, peaking between September 1936 and August 1938 under Nikolai Yezhov. Party leaders, Old Bolsheviks, officials and regional bosses were removed, imprisoned or executed by shooting or sent to Gulag camps, and ethnic minorities including Volga Germans and Soviet citizens of Polish origin were subjected to forced deportation and extreme repression. It is within living memory of the oldest Russians and it is not commemorated the way the war is.
13. 1941 Germany invades the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, opening the Eastern Front — the Great Patriotic War — which lasted until 9 May 1945. The Soviets were caught completely unprepared, then broke the Axis at Stalingrad, the bloodiest battle of the war and arguably of human history, and crippled German offensive capability at Kursk.
14. 1945 Soviet losses within postwar borders now stand, on Russian government figures, at 26.6 million, including 8 to 9 million from famine and disease — more than half of all the war's deaths were in the Soviet Union and China. No single figure explains more about Russian public life: 9 May is the central national holiday, war memorials stand in every town, and the war is the one part of the Soviet past that the present state claims without qualification.
15. 1957 Sputnik is launched on 4 October 1957 and Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space on 12 April 1961. The space programme occupies a place in the national imagination closer to art than to engineering, Gagarin's flight is commemorated annually, and the Moscow monuments and museums built around it are among the most visited things in the city.
16. 1991 On 8 December the leaders of the three founding republics sign the Belovezha Accords declaring that the Soviet Union no longer exists; Gorbachev resigns on 25 December and transfers his powers, including the nuclear launch codes, to Boris Yeltsin; and the Union is formally dissolved on 26 December 1991. Fifteen states replaced the Union, and the borders between them are the administrative lines of the Soviet republics.
17. 2014 Russia attacks Ukraine, annexing Crimea and beginning the Donbas war, in which the paramilitary forces of the Russian-backed breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk fought Ukraine. This is the year the present war began, eight years before the date most of the world dates it from, and it is when the first significant Western sanctions were imposed.
18. 2022 On 24 February 2022 Russia starts trying to invade the rest of Ukraine, starting the largest and deadliest war and refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War. The British government advises against all travel to Russia as a result.