Britannica Guide to Russia

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) ©Photo.com/Jupiterimages, courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837): portrait copied by Fyodor Igin from original by Orest Kiprensky © RIA Novosti/ Topfoto.co.uk.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) The Bettman Archive, courtesy of Encyclopedia Britannica Inc.

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960) with companion Olga Iwinskaja and their daughter Irina in the late 1950s © ullstein- bild/To pfoto.co.uk.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), August 30,1970 © Topfoto.co.uk,

Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin (1934-68) in 1961 Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images, courtesy of En cyclop cedia Britannica Inc.

Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) on a state visit to Poland © Bernard Bisson & Thierry Orban/Sygma/Corbis.

Military parade in Moscow's Red Square in 1985 Tass/Sovfoto, courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.

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Vladimir Putin (b. 1952) President of Russia, The Kremlin, Courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.

Maps

Physical map of Russia

Political map of present-day Russia

Moscow

The Trans-Siberian Railway

INTRODUCTION

MARY DEJEVSKY

Russia can claim to be one of the most grievously misunder­stood countries of the early twenty-first century. A vast land mass, with a harsh climate and declining population, the country boasts as rich a history and as glorious a culture as any in the world. Yet the upheavals it experienced in the twentieth century - from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the largely peaceful reversal of that revolution before the century was out - left the country and its people exhausted, while striving to catch up with a European and global main­stream that had largely passed them by.

in between came a brutal civil war, mass emigration of the aristocracy and professional classes, enforced collectivization of agriculture, Stalin's purges, the battle for national survival that was Russia's experience of the Second World War, and ultimate defeat in the Cold War that pitted East against West. By the late 1980s, Russians could do little more than watch as the Soviet empire dissolved around them and the thought-system that had anchored so much of their lives was discredited. Few would have emerged unscathed from such a catalogue of adversity, whether self-inflicted or not.

It is a sign of Russian resilience that after a century of such turmoil, and less than 20 years after the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Russia is settling as smoothly as it is into a new age and a new political system inside new state borders. With three-quarters of the territory and only half the population of the Soviet Union, it is more ethnically and culturally homogeneous (though ethnic minorities still consti­tute roughly one-fifth of the population) in its reconstituted statehood. But it is also - as it appears from Moscow - more vulnerable.

When the predominantly non-Slav republics became inde­pendent in 1991-2, Russia lost what had been a substantial buffer zone to its west, east, and south. The former Soviet bloc countries of east and central Europe and the Baltic states that had formed a reluctant western flank of the Soviet Union then allied themselves with the West, by joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, and Russia's age-old fears of hostile encirclement returned. Security and domestic stability became the twin preoccupations of Russia's post-Soviet leadership.

For all the disappointment regularly expressed outside Rus­sia about the country's slow pace of political and economic development in the post-Soviet years, it is rarely recalled that the consequences of the Soviet Union's demise could have been much, much worse. As the communist system breathed its last and in the often chaotic years that followed, Russia remained intact and - for the most part - free of conflict. Yet at the time this could not have been taken for granted.