History of Russia

RUSSIA IS THE LARGEST of the fifteen geopolitical entities that emerged in 1991 from the Soviet Union. Covering more than 17 million square kilometers in Europe and Asia, Russia succeeded the Soviet Union as the largest country in the world. As was the case in the Soviet and tsarist eras, the center of Russia’s population and economic activity is the European sector, which occupies about one-quarter of the country’s territory. Vast tracts of land in Asian Russia are virtually unoccupied. Although numerous Soviet programs had attempted to populate and exploit resources in Siberia and the Arctic regions of the Russian Republic, the population of Russia’s remote areas decreased in the 1990s. Thirty-nine percent of Russia’s territory but only 6 percent of its population in 1996 was located east of Lake Baikal, the geographical landmark in south-central Siberia. The territorial extent of the country constitutes a major economic and political problem for Russian governments lacking the far-reaching authoritarian clout of their Soviet predecessors. In the Soviet political system, which was self-described as a democratic federation of republics, the center of authority for almost all actions of consequence was Moscow, the capital of the Russian Republic. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, that long-standing concentration of power meant that many of the other fourteen republics faced independence without any experience at self-governance. For Russia, the end of the Soviet Union meant facing the world without the considerable buffer zone of Soviet republics that had protected and nurtured it in various ways since the 1920s; the change required complete reorganization of what had become a thoroughly corrupt and ineffectual socialist system. Under those circumstances, Russia has undergone an agonizing process of self-analysis and refocusing of national goals. That process, which seemingly had only begun in the mid-1990s, has been observed and commented upon with more analytic energy than any similar transformation in the history of the world. As information pours out past the ruins of the Iron Curtain, a new, more reliable portrait of Russia emerges, but substantial mystery remains. In a history-making year, the regime of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union was mortally injured by an unsuccessful coup in August 1991. After all the constituent republics, including Russia, had voted for independence in the months that followed the coup, Gorbachev announced in December 1991 that the nation would cease to exist. In place of the monolithic union, there remained the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS--see Glossary), a loose confederation of eleven of the former Soviet republics, which now were independent states with an indefinite mandate of mutual cooperation. By late 1991, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU--see Glossary) and the Communist Party of the Russian Republic had been banned in Russia, and Boris N. Yeltsin, who had been elected president of the Russian Republic in June 1991, had become the leader of the new Russian Federation. In the late 1980s, Yeltsin’s appeals for political reform gained him the enmity of the communist hierarchy, including Gorbachev, but he won the support of a Russian public whose self-expression had been liberated by Gorbachev’s own policy of glasnost (literally, public voicing--see Glossary). In that period, the atmosphere of Russia, especially its main cities, Moscow and Leningrad, was one of expectation that significant political changes finally would occur after the sclerotic decades of the Brezhnev regime (1964-82). The first years of Yeltsin’s presidency, which began with an overt challenge to the Soviet Union’s authority over Russian affairs, brought a surge of activity that promised economic and political reform and an end to the economic stagnation and social malaise of the 1980s. Both Russians and Westerners hoped that Russia could make a short, painless transformation to democratic rule and free-market economics. Although events of the first five post-Soviet years provided some reasons for optimism, all observers soon realized that whatever transformation Russia was to experience would require much more time, and would yield much less predictable results, than initially expected. At the time it became independent, the Russian Federation included nineteen autonomous republics, ten autonomous regions, and one autonomous oblast, each designated for a particular ethnic group. The ethnically Russian population was (and remains) the largest group in all but a handful of the republics and autonomous regions; most of the exceptions, where the local ethnic groups constitute a majority, are located in the North Caucasus. In 1989 the Baltic republics’ declarations of sovereignty within the Soviet Union began a cascade of similar declarations by jurisdictions within Rus