The History of Russia and the USSR (Told in 5 Minutes)

Russia went from a handful of medieval principalities to an empire spanning eleven time zones, then to the Soviet Union and, since 1991, to today’s Russian Federation. If you just want the headlines: Ivan the Terrible was the first tsar (1547), the Romanovs ruled for three centuries until the 1917 revolution, the USSR existed from 1922 to 1991, and Vladimir Putin has led the country since 2000.

Here is the full timeline, from Kievan Rus to the present day, with the figures you will run into in every palace, museum and statue in the country. At the end there is a table linking each era to what you can actually visit today, plus a section on where things stand right now.

The history of Russia at a glance

One detail that surprises a lot of people: Russia Day is celebrated on 12 June, marking the 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty. It is a young holiday, with street concerts and fireworks. The date that really moves the country is a different one, 9 May, Victory Day, with the military parade on Red Square.

1. Before the tsars: Kievan Rus and Moscow (9th-15th centuries)

• 882. Prince Oleg takes Kiev and Kievan Rus is born, the state that Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians all claim as their ancestor. Much of today’s identity argument between the three countries starts right here.
• 988. Vladimir I adopts Byzantine Christianity. That single decision explains the Cyrillic alphabet, the onion domes and the icons you will see in every church in the country.
• 1147. First written mention of Moscow, then a fortified village of no importance whatsoever.
• 1237-1240. The Mongol invasion devastates the Russian principalities. For two and a half centuries the local princes pay tribute to the Golden Horde.
• 1480. Ivan III, the Great, stops paying that tribute and unifies the territories around Moscow. He is the one who ordered the red-brick walls and towers of the Moscow Kremlin you see today, built by Italian architects.

2. Ivan the Terrible and the birth of the tsardom (1547-1584)

• 1547. Ivan IV is crowned tsar, the first to carry that title (it comes from Caesar). He reigned for almost forty years, the longest reign in Russian history up to that point.
• 1552-1556. He conquers the Tatar khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. If you visit the Kazan Kremlin you will be walking through the setting of that conquest, now a World Heritage Site.
• 1555-1561. St Basil’s Cathedral is built to commemorate the capture of Kazan. It is the most photographed building in Russia.
• 1558-1583. The Livonian War, a failed attempt to reach the Baltic. The conquest of Siberia, on the other hand, succeeds and opens up the expansion eastwards.
• He married at least seven times. His reputation as terrible comes from the oprichnina, a violent purge of the nobility, and from killing his own heir in a fit of rage.

3. The Time of Troubles and the arrival of the Romanovs (1598-1613)

When Ivan’s last descendant died without an heir, Russia fell into fifteen years of chaos: famine, civil war, impostors claiming to be the dead tsarevich, and a Polish occupation of Moscow. This is what Russians call the Smuta, the Time of Troubles.

• 1612. A popular militia led by Minin and Pozharsky drives the Poles out of the Kremlin. Their monument stands in front of St Basil’s, right on Red Square.
• 1613. Sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov is elected tsar. So begins a dynasty that will rule for 304 years, until 1917.

4. Peter the Great and the Russian Empire (1682-1725)

• He stood 2.04 metres tall and travelled incognito through Holland and England to learn shipbuilding. He came back determined to westernise the country by force: he reorganised the army, built a navy from scratch, and even taxed long beards.
• 1703. He founds Saint Petersburg on Baltic marshland. The Peter and Paul Fortress was the city’s first building and almost every Romanov is buried there.
• 1712. He moves the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg. It stays there until 1918.
• 1721. The Treaty of Nystad ends twenty-one years of war with Sweden: Russia gains Estonia, Livonia and its outlet to the Baltic. Peter proclaims himself emperor and the Russian Empire is officially born.
• His summer residence, Peterhof, with fountains that run on gravity alone and no pumps at all, is still the most popular day trip from Saint Petersburg.

5. Catherine the Great and the imperial golden age (1762-1796)

She was a German princess who arrived in Russia at fifteen to marry the heir to the throne and ended up deposing him in a palace coup. She ruled for 34 years and the empire grew as never before.

• 1764. She buys a first collection of paintings that becomes the seed of the Hermitage. Today it is one of the largest museums in the world, and that purchase is its founding act.
• 1768-1792. Two wars against the Ottoman Empire give Russia the northern coast of the Black Sea. Crimea is annexed in 1783 and Odesa, Sevastopol and Kherson are founded.
• 1772-1795. The three partitions of Poland with Prussia and Austria absorb what are now Belarus, Lithuania and much of Ukraine.
• A patron of the Enlightenment who corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, she nevertheless tightened serfdom. Her architectural folly in Moscow, Tsaritsyno, can be visited today.

6. The 19th century: Napoleon, serfs and revolutionaries

• 1812. Napoleon invades Russia with more than 600,000 men. After the battle of Borodino the Russians abandon Moscow and the city burns. Winter and the collapse of supply lines destroy the Grande Armée during the retreat. Tolstoy told the story in War and Peace, and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was built precisely to commemorate that victory.
• 1825. The Decembrist revolt in Saint Petersburg, the first attempt to impose a constitution. It fails and its leaders end up in Siberia.
• 1853-1856. The Crimean War against France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire. Russia loses, and just how far behind the country has fallen becomes impossible to ignore.
• 1861. Alexander II abolishes serfdom, freeing more than twenty million peasants. He is still killed by a bomb in 1881: the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood was built on the exact spot.
• 1891-1916. The Trans-Siberian Railway is built, 9,289 kilometres of track stitching the empire together end to end.
• 1904-1905. Defeat by Japan triggers the 1905 revolution. Nicholas II is forced to grant Russia’s first constitution and a parliament, the Duma.
• 1914. Rivalry with Austria in the Balkans drags Russia into the First World War alongside France and Britain. Military defeats and hunger in the cities will finish off the monarchy.

7. 1917: the two revolutions and the end of the Romanovs

• February 1917. Strikes and bread protests in Petrograd force Nicholas II to abdicate. A provisional government takes over. Tsarism ends after 370 years.
• October 1917. Lenin’s Bolsheviks overthrow that provisional government. The signal was a shot fired by the cruiser Aurora, still moored in Saint Petersburg and open to visitors. Soviet Russia is born.
• July 1918. Nicholas II, his wife, their five children and four servants are shot in a cellar in Yekaterinburg. The Church on the Blood stands on that site today. In 2000 the Orthodox Church canonised them.
• 1918-1922. Civil war between the Red Army and the Whites, foreign intervention included. Between fighting, famine and epidemics, several million people die. The capital returns to Moscow in 1918.

8. The birth of the USSR and the death of Lenin (1922-1924)

• 30 December 1922. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is officially established. In 1924 Britain, France and Italy recognise it.
• January 1924. Lenin dies. His body is embalmed and displayed in a mausoleum on Red Square, where it still lies a century later. Admission is free, opening hours are short, and no photos are allowed.
• Petrograd is renamed Leningrad. It will not become Saint Petersburg again until 1991.

9. The Stalin era (1924-1953)

• 1924-1929. Joseph Stalin outmanoeuvres Trotsky and the rest of his rivals in the struggle to succeed Lenin. He will rule until his death.
• 1928. First Five-Year Plan: forced-march industrialisation and the collectivisation of agriculture. The famine of 1932-1933 kills millions, above all in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
• 1936-1938. The Great Purge. Show trials, mass executions and the expansion of the camp system, the Gulag. The Moscow metro and the great projects of the period were built in large part with that forced labour.
• August 1939. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, with a secret protocol carving up Eastern Europe. In September the USSR occupies eastern Poland.
• 1939-1940. The Winter War against Finland, which ends with the cession of Karelia. In the summer of 1940, in a separate operation, the USSR annexes Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
• 22 June 1941. Germany invades the USSR. What Russia calls the Great Patriotic War begins. The siege of Leningrad lasts 872 days and starves hundreds of thousands of civilians.
• February 1943. German surrender at Stalingrad (today Volgograd), the bloodiest battle in history, with close to two million casualties on both sides. It is the turning point of the war in Europe.
• 9 May 1945. Soviet troops take Berlin and Germany capitulates. The USSR loses around 27 million people, the highest figure of any combatant. That day is Russia’s great national date.
• 1949. The USSR tests its first atomic bomb and the Cold War sets in for good.

10. The Cold War: from Sputnik to Brezhnev (1953-1985)

• 1953. Stalin dies. Nikita Khrushchev takes power and in 1956 denounces his crimes in the famous secret speech. The Thaw begins and the camps are largely emptied.
• 1955. The Warsaw Pact is signed, the answer to NATO.
• 4 October 1957. Sputnik becomes the first artificial satellite. The space race is told very well at the Museum of Cosmonautics and at VDNH park.
• 12 April 1961. Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space. 12 April is still a holiday in Russia.
• 13 August 1961. The Berlin Wall goes up.
• October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis: the closest the world has come to nuclear war.
• 1963. The hotline between Washington and Moscow is installed and the Partial Test Ban Treaty is signed.
• 1964. Khrushchev is removed and Leonid Brezhnev takes over for eighteen years. This is the era of stagnation: stability, shortages and queues.
• 1968. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is signed, in force from 1970. That same year, Warsaw Pact tanks crush the Prague Spring.
• 1979. The invasion of Afghanistan, a ten-year war that will bleed the USSR dry.
• 1980. The Moscow Olympics, boycotted by more than sixty countries over Afghanistan. The US and the USSR return the favour in Los Angeles in 1984.

11. Gorbachev, perestroika and the end of the USSR (1985-1991)

• 1985. Mikhail Gorbachev becomes general secretary at 54 and launches perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (openness in the media).
• 26 April 1986. The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine. The initial attempt to cover it up badly damages the system’s credibility.
• 1988-1989. Withdrawal from Afghanistan, the first multi-candidate elections, and independence protests in the Baltics. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall falls without Moscow intervening.
• 1990. Gorbachev receives the Nobel Peace Prize. Lithuania is the first republic to declare independence. On 12 June the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Russia is adopted, celebrated today as Russia Day.
• June 1991. Boris Yeltsin wins the first direct presidential election in Russian history.
• August 1991. An attempted coup by communist hardliners. Yeltsin climbs onto a tank outside parliament and the putsch collapses in three days.
• 8 and 25 December 1991. The presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus sign the dissolution of the USSR and create the CIS. On the 25th, Gorbachev resigns and the Soviet flag is lowered over the Kremlin. The Soviet Union ceases to exist after 69 years.

12. The Yeltsin years (1991-1999)

• 1992. Price liberalisation and rapid privatisation. The rouble collapses, inflation explodes and the oligarchs appear. For many Russians these are the hardest years they can remember.
• October 1993. Constitutional crisis: Yeltsin dissolves parliament, the deputies barricade themselves in and the army ends up shelling Moscow’s White House. In December 1993 a referendum approves the constitution still in force, which hands the president sweeping powers.
• 1994-1996. The First Chechen War, with tens of thousands of dead and a peace deal that leaves the conflict frozen.
• 1997. The NATO-Russia Founding Act is signed.
• August 1998. Financial crisis and default. The rouble loses three quarters of its value in a matter of weeks.
• 31 December 1999. Yeltsin resigns out of the blue on New Year’s Eve, leaving his prime minister as acting president: a little-known former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin.

13. The Putin era (2000 to today)

2000-2008: the first terms

• 2000. Putin wins the election and reorganises the country into seven federal districts. In August the submarine Kursk sinks and all 118 crew die.
• 1999-2009. The Second Chechen War. These years also bring the sieges of the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow (2002) and the school in Beslan (2004), with more than three hundred dead, most of them children.
• 2000-2008. The oil price multiplies and living standards rise with it. That is the basis of Putin’s popular support through the decade.

2008-2013: the tandem with Medvedev

• 2008. Dmitry Medvedev is elected president and Putin becomes prime minister. In August, a five-day war with Georgia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. That autumn the global financial crisis hits Russia hard.
• 2011-2012. Putin returns to the presidency. The largest protests since the 1990s fill the streets of Moscow and end with hundreds of arrests.

2014-2021: Sochi, Crimea and the World Cup

• February 2014. The Sochi Winter Olympics, the most expensive in history.
• March 2014. After the fall of the pro-Russian government in Kiev, Russian forces without insignia take control of Crimea, which holds a referendum on joining Russia. That referendum is not recognised by Ukraine, the European Union, the United States or most of the UN. In parallel, armed conflict breaks out in the Donbas, killing around 14,000 people up to 2021.
• July 2014. Flight MH17 is shot down over eastern Ukraine with 298 people on board.
• December 2014. Western sanctions and the fall in oil prices sink the rouble, which loses half its value.
• 2015. Russia intervenes militarily in Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad’s government.
• 2018. Putin is re-elected and Russia hosts the FIFA World Cup. It is the biggest year for foreign tourism in its recent history: for the first time, millions of visitors discover that Moscow and Saint Petersburg are comfortable, safe cities for travellers.
• 2020. A constitutional reform approved by referendum resets Putin’s term count, allowing him to run again until 2036. The pandemic arrives too.
• 2021. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny is jailed on his return to Russia and his organisations are outlawed.

2022: the offensive in Ukraine and the turning point for travellers

On 24 February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale military offensive against Ukraine from the north, east and south. Moscow officially calls it a special military operation; Ukraine, the European Union, the United States and the UN General Assembly (141 votes in favour of the resolution of 2 March 2022) call it an invasion.

• March 2022. The European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada close their airspace to Russian airlines, and Russia responds in kind. Visa and Mastercard suspend operations in Russia and several Russian banks are cut off from SWIFT. Hundreds of Western companies leave the country.
• September 2022. Partial mobilisation of reservists and the declared annexation of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, not recognised internationally.
• June 2023. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group stages an armed mutiny that advances towards Moscow and stops within a day. Prigozhin dies two months later in a plane crash.
• 2024. Navalny dies in an Arctic prison in February. In March Putin is re-elected for a fifth term and days later an attack at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow kills more than 140 people. In August, Ukrainian troops enter Russia’s Kursk region.

For travellers the practical change was brutal: direct flights from Europe ended, foreign bank cards stopped working, and Booking, Airbnb and Google Maps became useless inside the country. None of that has gone back to normal. How to travel today with those constraints is explained in travel to Russia now.

Where things stand in 2026

In 2026 the conflict continues. Direct talks between Russia and Ukraine resumed in Istanbul in 2025, the first since 2022, but they produced only prisoner exchanges and the repatriation of bodies, with no agreement on the substance. The US-Russia summit held in Anchorage, Alaska, in August 2025 did not deliver either: a year on, both sides consider what was agreed there void and talk about starting from scratch.

Meanwhile Ukraine has stepped up drone attacks on refineries and energy infrastructure inside Russia, causing occasional fuel supply problems, and the Russian economy is growing at a minimal rate of around 1 %, propped up by military spending and carrying more than twenty rounds of European sanctions. Neither side has so far accepted a ceasefire on the other’s terms.

What is left of each era when you travel today

This is the part that will actually be useful on the ground. Every era left its mark and almost all of it can be visited:

If you want to plan city by city, there are the complete guides to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, plus the visa section to work out what you need for your nationality. The Kremlin and Red Square have been a World Heritage Site since 1990: you can check the official entry on the UNESCO website and museum information on the Moscow Kremlin Museums portal.

Frequently asked questions about the history of Russia