Russia

The lands that became Russia were inhabited in antiquity by Scythian, Sarmatian, and Finno-Ugric peoples, with Greek colonies on the northern Black Sea coast. From the sixth and seventh centuries, East Slavic tribes spread across the forested plains between the Baltic and the upper Volga. According to the Primary Chronicle, Varangian (Norse) leaders were invited to rule among them, and in 882 Oleg of Novgorod established his seat at Kiev, founding the polity known as Kievan Rus. The conversion of Vladimir the Great to Eastern Christianity in 988 anchored the region within the Byzantine cultural sphere. Kievan Rus fragmented in the twelfth century and was overrun by the Mongol invasion of 1237 to 1240, after which the principalities paid tribute to the Golden Horde for roughly two centuries.

The Grand Duchy of Moscow gradually absorbed neighbouring principalities and threw off Mongol suzerainty under Ivan III in 1480. His grandson, Ivan IV (the Terrible), was crowned the first tsar of all Russia in 1547 and pushed the realm eastward into the Volga basin and Siberia. After the dynastic collapse and foreign intervention of the Time of Troubles, the Romanov dynasty was established in 1613 and would rule until 1917. Peter the Great, crowned in 1682, reorganised the state along European lines, founded Saint Petersburg in 1703, and proclaimed the Russian Empire in 1721. Catherine the Great extended the empire into the northern Black Sea region and partitioned Poland during the eighteenth century, and the empire reached its greatest extent in the nineteenth, incorporating the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Pacific territories, while serfdom was abolished in 1861.

Defeat and economic strain during the First World War triggered the February Revolution of 1917, the abdication of Nicholas II, and, in October, the Bolshevik seizure of power led by Vladimir Lenin. A civil war between Reds and Whites ended in Bolshevik victory, and in 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed, with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as its largest constituent. Under Joseph Stalin, the USSR underwent forced collectivisation, rapid industrialisation, and mass political repression. The Soviet Union bore enormous losses in the Second World War (the Great Patriotic War) before emerging as a superpower and a principal pole of the Cold War, contesting global influence with the United States and leading the Warsaw Pact.

Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost from 1985 loosened central control, and on 25 December 1991 the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. The Russian Federation, under President Boris Yeltsin, adopted a new constitution in 1993 after a violent confrontation with parliament, undertook market reforms, and fought two wars in Chechnya. Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin at the end of 1999 and, alternating with Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister and president, has dominated political life since. Russia's relations with Western states deteriorated sharply after the 2008 war with Georgia, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which prompted extensive international sanctions.

Russia today is a federal semi-presidential republic comprising numerous constituent regions, republics, and territories, with its government seated in Moscow and executive authority concentrated in the presidency.