860 Vikings raid Constantinople
882 Alfred the Great Oleg defeats Askold and Dir
Khazar hegemony over Kiev
c. 955 Olga visits Constantinople
Sviatoslav conquers Khazars
Christianization of Rus
Vladimir builds St Sofia in Kiev Iaroslav the Wise (d. 1054)
1066 Normans conquer England
1068 Rus defeated by Polovtsians (Cumans)
1113 Vladimir Monomakh,
Prince of Vladimir-Suzdal
1204 Crusaders sack Constantinople
1232 Baty Khan routs Russians Mongol era begins
1240 Collapse of Kievan Rus Alexander Nevskii beats
off Swedes and German
Knights
c. 1300 Rise of Vladimir-Moscow
1325 Metropolitan of Kiev moves
to Moscow
1331 Ivan I (Money-Bag) becomes
grand prince
1380 Dmitrii defeats Tatars at
Kulikovo
1400 St Sergius. Monastic colonization
1413 Treaty of Horodlo Catholicization in Lithuania
1425 Growth of Inca Empire Vasilii 11
1441 Council of Ferrara Ivan III (the Great)
Louis XI of France
1453 Constantinople falls to Turks Lorenzo de’ Medici
Henry the Navigator Novgorod subjected to Moscow
1472 Ivan III m. Zoe Palaeologue
1485 Henry VII of England
Aztec Empire
1547 Ivan IV (the Terrible)
1550 Spain and Portugal build empires Law book issued
Kazan captured
First Russian outposts in
Caucasus
Conquest of Siberian khanate
Livonian war
English merchants discover
Russia
Archangel established
Boris Godunov
1601 Onset of Little Ice Age Mangazeia founded
1605 Russia in turmoil
Collapse of Muscovite state
Pretender Dmitrii takes Moscow
1606 Swedes invade
1612 Moscow recaptured
1613 Michael Romanov crowned tsar
1630-31 War with Poland Smolensk recaptured
1648 Fronde in France Dezhnev reaches Pacific
English Civil War Ukrainian Cossacks rebel against Polish rule
1654 War with Poland Ukrainian Cossacks submit to Tsar Alexis
1660 Restoration of monarchy
in England
1667 Peace of Andrusovo: Russia
gains eastern Ukraine
1676 Death of Alexis, accession
of Fedor
1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk with China
1689-1725 Peter I (the Great)
Great Northern War
1703 Foundation of St Petersburg
1709 Russians rout Swedes at Poltava
1711 Russians defeated by Turks
on river Pruth
1716 Orenburg Line begun (base for
future expansion into Central
Asia)
Annexation of Baltic states
1724 War with Persia
1725 Catherine I
1726 Alliance with Habsburg Emperor
1727 Peter II
1730 Anna Iovanovna
1741 Elizabeth Petrovna
1756-63 Seven Years War
1761 Peter III
1762 Catherine II
1769-73 American Revolution War with Turks
First partition of Poland
1783 Annexation of Crimea
1787-93 French Revolution War with Turks
1793 Second partition of Poland
1795 Revolutionary Wars Third partition of Poland
18oo Napolean A Russian fleet enters the
Mediterranean
1803 A Russian ship circumnavigates
the globe
1808 Finland annexed
1811 Bessarabia annexed
1812 Russia invaded by
Napoleon’s Grande Armée
1815 Waterloo Russian troops in Paris
1820s War in Chechnya
Russia sponsors Greek independence
1828-9 Russians take Tabriz and
Erzurum
Russia penetrates Central
Asia and Far East; gains
access to Mediterranean
Russia sponsors autonomous
Serbia
Russian colonization of
Alaska
1837-1901 Queen Victoria
1853-6 Crimean War
1864 American Civil War Russians take Chimkent
1865 Samarkand
1873 Khiva Kokand
1877-8 War with Turks
Russia sponsors Bulgarian
Independence
Railway-building
1885 Heyday of British Empire Russians defeat Afghans at
Pendjeh
1890s Russia industrializes Trans-Siberian Railway
1896 Russia—China accord
1904 War with Japan
1905 Battle of Tsushima
1914-18 First World War
1917 Nicholas II abdicates; end of
Romanov Empire
Bolsheviks remove
Provisional Government
I918- Civil War
War with Poland
Loss of Baltic states,
Ukraine, etc.
1924 Death of Lenin; power
gravitates to Stalin
1928-9 Great Depression Stalin launches
Collectivization and first
Five-Year Plan
1933 Hitler in power in Germany
1934-8 Purges and show trials
1938 Munich Agreement
1939 Second World War begins in West
1940 Occupation of Baltic states
1941 Pearl Harbor; US enters WWII Hitler invades Soviet Union
1942 Battle of Stalingrad
1943 Battle of Kursk; Germans
in retreat
1944 Invasion of Normandy Yalta Conference
1945 Atomic bomb dropped on Japan Soviet forces take Berlin Potsdam agreement
1947 Marshall Plan Onset of the Cold War
Chinese Communists defeat Soviet Bloc formed
Nationalists
1949 Soviet Union acquires atom
bomb; breach with China
1953 Death of Stalin
1954 COMECON becomes active
1955 Warsaw Pact
1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary
1959 Cuba aligns with Moscow
1961 Soviet Union puts first astronaut
into space
1964 Brezhnev replaces Khrushchev
1968 Soviet intervention in
Czechoslovakia
1979 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan
1982 Andropov becomes Party
Secretary
1984 Death of Andropov; Chernenko
succeeds him
1985 Death of Chernenko; Gorbachev
becomes Party Secretary;
detente with West
1986 Chernobyl disaster
1988-91 Reunification of Germany Collapse of Bloc
Dissolution of Soviet Union
1992 Yeltsin as Russian president
Catastrophic decline
Russia reverts to frontiers
of c. 1650
1994-6 NATO extends eastward First Chechen War
US warships enter Black Sea
2000 Putin becomes president
Reassertion of Russian interests
Economic recovery
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. One of the few exceptions is Basil Sumner’s masterly Survey of Russian History (2nd edn, London, 1947).
1: THE RUSSIANS: WHO ARE THEY?
1. B. M. Fagan, The Journey from Ede: The Peopling of Our World (London, 1990), p. 183. At one time mammoth tusks had been plentiful enough to use as building frames
or tent poles.
2. O. Semino et al., ‘The genetic legacy of palaeolothic Homo sapiens sapiens in extant Europeans’, Science, 290 (5404), 10 November 2000, 1155—9, and the interview with Peter Underhill in Montreal Gazette, 11 November 2000, p. D-9. Also L. Cavalli-Sforza, P. Menozzi and A. Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, 1994), pp. 3—59 (for the principles) and map 5.2.7, pp. 262—3, and atlas C-5 (for the geographic spread). Despite subsequent intermarriage with Mongols and other peoples of different genetic heritage, the evidence shows Russians to be of predominately Caucasian stock. There was a discursive but interesting discussion on genetics relevant to history on the Marshall Poe e-mail connection ([email protected] ) in September 2002. It centred on haplotype M17, which distinguishes eastern from western Europeans.
3. V. Bunak, ‘Antropologicheskie tipy russkago naroda i voprosy istorii ikh formirovanie’, Kratkie soobshcheniia Instituta etnografii AN/SSR, 36 (1962), 75-82.
4. L. and F. Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diaspora (Reading, Mass., 1995), especially pp. 115—16. For indications of genetic differences between Russians and other Europeans, see Cavalli-Sforza et al., History and Geography of Human Genes, p. 270.
5. G. Vernadsky, Ancient Russia (New Haven, 1947, repr. 1973), pp. 21-2; D Christian, A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 77—8; J. Mallory, In Search of Indo-Europeans. Language, Archaeology and Myth (London, 1989), p. 196.
6. P. Dolukhanov, The Early Slavs: Eastern Europe from the Initial Settlement to Kievan Rus’ (London, 1996), p. 70. Sredny Stog is associated with the domestication of the horse.
7. Christian, Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1, p. 40.
8. Dolukhanov, The Early Slavs, pp. 101-2.
9. Ibid., pp. 109-15.
10. See C. Renfrew, Archaeology and Language (London, 1987) — but also his critic J. Mallory, who concludes that Renfrew’s idea of the spread of the first Indo-Europeans ‘is not congruent with either the linguistic or archaeological evidence’ (In Search of Indo-Europeans. Language, Archaeology and Myth). I am grateful to my former colleague Bruce Trigger for guidance in this area. While haplotype U entered the bloodstream of Europeans some 40,000 years ago, and haplotypes H and V more than 10,000 years ago, bearers of haplotype J ‘may well have descended from … women who came to Europe 8,000 years ago from Anatolia’ - Times Literary Supplement, May 2001, in a review of B. Sykes’s The Seven Daughters of Eve.
11. ‘At that time there was only one Slavic people, including those along the Danube who were subject to the Hungarians, the Moravians, Czechs, Poles and Polanians, who are now called Russians’ (adapted from the translation by S. Cross and P. Olgerd, eds., of The Russian Primary Chronicle (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 62).
12. Baedeker, Russia: A Handbook for Travellers (Leipzig, 1914), pp. xxxviii-xxxix.
13. L. Milev, Velikorusskii pakhar’ i osobennosti rossiiskogo istoricheskogo protsessa (Moscow, 1998), pp. 554—6. Milev’s theory will receive some attention later in the book.
14. Dolukhanov, The Early Slavs, pp. 117-19; M. Gimbutas, The Slavs (London, 1971), pp. 24-5; Vernadsky, Ancient Russia, pp. 48-50.
15. Dolukhanov, The Early Slavs, pp. 119—25; Gimbutas, The Slavs, pp. 44, 46—9.
16. See V. Levasheva in Trudy gosudarstvennogo istoricheskogo muzeia, vyp. 32 (Moscow, 1956), pp. 2off., and B. Grekov, Die Bauern in des Russlands von den ältesten Zeiten bis den 17 Jahrhundert (2 vols., Berlin, 1959), passim.
17. Christian, Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1, pp. 331—3.
18. See the maps in P. Barford, The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (Ithaca, 2001), pp. 376, 378.
19. On the properties of Russian rye and the lore associated with it see R. Smith and D. Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 5—6 and passim; Christian, Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1, p. 331 (and inference therefrom).
20. Barford, The Early Slavs, especially the maps on pp. 387, 399.
21. See the suggestive passage in ibid., pp. 189-91. Also W. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight (University Park, Pa., 1999), ch. 2, esp. p. 37.
22. Christian, Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1, p. 340. For a translation of the passage from Ibn Khurdadhbih see G. Vernadsky et al., A Source Book for Russian History from the Earliest Times to 1917 (3 vols., New Haven, 1972), vol. 1, p. 9. On Khazar metrology and money economy see O. Pritsak, The Origins of the Old Rus’Weights and Monetary Systems (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), esp. p. 32. On taxes paid to Khazar towns see Barford, The Early Slavs, p. 237.
23. The remains at Old Ladoga, like the first settlements at Novgorod, have been carefully investigated by archaeologists — see M. Brisbane, ed., Archaeology of Novgorod: Recent Results from the Town and its Hinterland, Society for Medieval Archaeology, monograph 13 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992); for the broader background S. Franklin and J. Shepard, The Emergence of Rus’ 730—1200 (London, 1996), pp. 12ff. On the early association of Vikings and Slavs, see M. Liubavskii, Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii, ed. A. la. Degtarev et al. (Moscow, 1996), p. 55.
24. Brisbane, ed., Archaeology of Novgorod, pp. 9off. See also E. Nosov, ‘The problem of the emergence of early urban centres in northern Russia’, in J. Chapman and P. Dolukhanov, Cultural Transformations and Interactions in Eastern Europe (Aldershot, 1993), pp. 236-56, and A. Kuza, ‘Sotsial’no-istoricheskaiatipologiia drevnerusskikh gorodov x—xiii vv’, in Russkii gorod: issledovania i materially, no. 176 (Moscow, 1983), pp. 4-36. On the phenomenon of ‘paired’ towns, see Nosov, ‘Early urban centres in northern Russia’, and the references therein.
25. Ibn Rusta is quoted in Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus’, p. 45.
26. I. Dubov, ‘The ethnic history of northwestern Rus’ in the ninth to the thirteenth centuries’, in D. Kaiser and G. Marker, eds., Reinterpreting Russian History (New York, 1994), pp. 14-20. Also A. Sakharov, ‘The main phase and distinctive features of Russian nationalism’, in G. Hosking and R. Service, eds., Reinterpreting Russian Nationalism (London, 1995), pp. 7—18.
2: THE FIRST RUSSIAN STATE
1. See A. Ya. Degtarev’s rationalization of the legend that the men of Novgorod summoned Riurik to rule as their prince in Liubavskii, Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii, p. 55.
2. The importance of the Khazars is suggested by the fact that Viking rulers of the early tenth century styled themselves ‘kagan’, the title of the Khazar ruler — see Barford, The Early Slavs, pp. 238—9. The Khazars were successful commercially, and even developed money economy and coinage - see O. Pritsak, ‘Did the Khazars possess a monetary economy?’, in his Origins of the Old Rus’ Weights and Monetary Systems, pp. 21—32.
3. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio, ed. Gy. Moravcik and R. Jenkins (2 vols., London, 1962), section 9: ‘On the coming of the Russians in “monolykha”.’See also Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus’.
4. C. Mango, trans., The Homilies of Photius (Cambridge, Mass, 1958), pp. 95ff.
5. See Vernadsky’s chronology in his Ancient Russia, pp. 394-5; Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus’, p. 57.
6. M. McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce,A.D. 300—900 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 610, 743, 760.
7. Christian, Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1, p. 342; Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus’, pp. 103-4; O. Pritsak, Origins of Rus’, vol. 1: Old Scandinavian Sources other than the Sagas (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p. 583.
8. I have adapted this passage from the Laurentian Chronicle from the translation in Vernadsky et al., Source Book, vol. 1, pp. 22-3.
9. The account of Olga that precedes and follows is derived from several sources, including Ye. A. Kivlitskii, ‘Sv. Ol’ga [Helen]’, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Brockhaus-Efron), vol. 21A (St Petersburg, 1897), PP. 910-11, Barford, The Early Slavs, p. 147; Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of R
us’, pp. 134-9.
10. For an account of taxation in Kievan Rus’, see G. Vernadsky, Kievan Russia (New Haven, 1948, repr. 1973), pp. 190-92.
11. I. Dubov, Voprosy istorii, 5 (1990), 15-17, translated in part in D. Kaiser and G. Marker, eds., Reinterpreting Russian History: Readings 860-1862 (New York, 1994), pp. 13-20. Dubov discusses the contributions of Vikings, Slavs and others to the development of society in the forest zone of central Russia.
12. See the translated excerpts from Ouranos and Liutprand in D. Geanakoplos, Byzantium: Church Society and Civilization seen through Contemporary Eyes (Chicago, 1984), pp. 112-13.
13. Yngvar’s saga, see Palsson and Edwards, Vikings in Russia, pp. 52, 55-6.
14. Constantine VII, De Administrando Imperio, section 9.
15. See Barford, The Early Slavs, p. 237.
16. Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus’, pp. 370—71.
17. A. Kazhdan and A. W. Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Berkeley, 1990), p. 81.
18. Constantine VII, Le Livre des cérémonies, ed. A. Vogt (Paris, 1935, 1939-40); Liutprand, Relatio de legatio Constantinopolitana, ed. J. Becker (Hanover and Leipzig, 1915); H. Evand and W. Wixom, eds., The Glory of Byzantium (New York, 1977); A. Kazhdan and M. McCormick, ‘The social world of the Byzantine courts’, in H. Maguire, ed., Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1209 (Washington, 1997), pp. 167-98.
19. I follow the interpretation in Kivlitskii, ‘Sv. Ol’ga [Helen]’, rather than Franklin and Shepard (The Emergence of Rus’, p. 137), who think that Olga was seeking legitimation for the new Russia from as many sources as possible. On the question of her baptism see G. Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State (Oxford, 1980), p. 283, n. 1.
20. Another translation of this excerpt from the Laurentian Chronicle is to be found in Vernadsky et al., Source Book, vol. 1, p.25.
21. For example, the recurring refrain ‘Dunai, Dunai’ in historical songs about Stepan Razin.
22. Vernadsky, Kievan Russia, p. 42; Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, pp. 292-6.
23. Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus’, p. 163.
24. I. Sevcenko, Ukraine between East and West (Edmonton, 1996).
25. G. H. Hamilton, The Art and Architecture of Russia (Harmondsworth, 1954), pp. 10—14.
26. Pritsak, Origins of Rus’, vol. 1, p. 32.
27. F. Dvornik, ‘Byzantine political ideas in Kievan Russia’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 9-10 (1956), 76-94.
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