2018-03-09
62History
Chronology
862 Rurik came to rule in Novgorod (The Invitation of the Varangians (Vikings)), establishing the Rurikid Dynasty.
988 Vladimir converts Rus’ to Orthodox Christianity.
1147 - The first reference to Moscow in chronicle.
1237 Tatar invasion begins.
5 April 1242 AleksandrNevskii defeats Teutonic Knights at Lake Chud’ (Lake Peipus) (“Battle of the Ice”).
1380 Battle of Kulikovo field. A Muscovite force defeated a significantly larger Tatar-Mongol army at Kulikovo Field.
1480 Encounter with Great Horde on River Ugra.
1497 Law Code (sudebnik) issued.
1533-1584 the Board of Ivan IV.
1547 Ivan IV became Tsar of all Rus’ (new title implied equality with Byzantine and Mongol rulers).
1552 Conquest of Kazan’.
1589 Russian patriarchate established.
1598-1613 ‘Time of Troubles’
1612 Second national militia, led by KuzmaMinin and Prince Pozharsky, succeeds inliberating Moscow.
1613 Michael Romanov is elected tsar.
1649 Conciliar Law Code (Ulozhenie) issued.
1670–1671 Sten’kaRazin’suprising along the Volga (which can be seen as a reaction to the hardships suffered by the lower sections of Muscovite society).
1700-1721 Great NorthernWar with Sweden.
1722 - Succession law 1722 which allowed the tsar to leave the throne to whoever he wished. Peter should nominate his successor, but he failed to do so before weakness overtook him.
1755 - foundation of Moscow University by Mikhail Lomonosov
1773-1775 – Pugachev's Rebellion
1783 - annexation of Crimea
1797 - new succession law of Paul I: male primogeniture established
1802 - creation of ministries
1812 Napoleon’s invasion, The Patriotic war
1812, September 7 – The Battle of Borodino.
1825 - death of Alexander I. Accession of Nicholas I. Decembrist Revolt (14 December)
1853 –1856 – The Crimean War
1861 - emancipation of the serfs
1874 – introduction of universal military service
1877–1878 - war with Ottoman Empire. Treaty of Berlin
1894 - Tsar Nicholas II came to the throne.
1903 - Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party split into the Bolsheviks (headed by V.I. Lenin) and Mensheviks.
1904-1905 - Russo-Japanese war.
1905 9 January: Bloody Sunday. Peaceful demonstrators arrived at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to present a petition to the tsar. The Imperial Guard fired on the crowd, killing around 200 and wounding 800.
1914 1 August - Germany declared war on Russia; outbreak of First World War. The city of Saint Petersburg was renamed Petrograd
1917 23–28 February – the ‘February Revolution’.
1917 2 March: Nicholas II abdicated.
1917 25 October: The ‘October Revolution’ established ‘Sovietpower’. Soldiers directed by the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet captured the Winter Palace, ending the power of the Russian Provisional Government.
1917 26/27 October: Soviet proclamations on land and peace. Death Penalty abolished.
1921 Tenth Congress of the RKP (b); the passing of the resolution against organised factions withinthe party; introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP).
1922 the USSR was formally inaugurated.
1924 death of Lenin.The city of Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honour.
1929 December: Stalin’s fiftieth birthday, the beginning of the ‘Stalin Cult’.
1932–1933 Famine in USSR.
1936-1938 The Great Purge or the Great Terror (campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union).
1936 Constitution of the USSR adopted.
1941, 22 June – 1945, 9 May – The Great Patriotic War
1942, 17 July – 1943, 2 February – Battle of Stalingrad
1941, 8 September – 1944, 27 January: The Siege of Leningrad, also known as the Leningrad Blockade
1949: USSR exploded its first atomic bomb
1953: death of Stalin. Malenkov became chairman of Council of Ministers
1956: Twentieth Congress of the CPSU; Khrushchev’s ‘SecretSpeech’
1957 4 October: Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite of theEarth
1961 12 April: Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space
1962: Cuban Missile Crisis
1964: Khrushchev removed as first secretary by the Central Committeeand replaced by Brezhnev
1979-1989: War in Afghanistan
1980: Olympic games in Moscow
1982: Brezhnev died and was succeeded by Andropov
1985: Gorbachev became leader of USSR
1986: Chernobyl’, nuclear accident
1991, 31 December: end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Terms, definitions etc.:
Knyaz‘ -(prince, duke) was a ruler of the state;
"Route from the Varangians to the Greeks" - medieval trade route extending from Scandinavia through KyivanRus’ to the Byzantine Empire.One of the main trade route of Eastern Europe.
Boyars - members of the highest rank of the feudal KievanRus‘
Three-field system - method of agricultural organization; in the three-field system only a third of the land lay fallow, in the autumn one third was planted, and in the spring another third of the land was planted to be harvested in late summer.
Oprichnina - a state policy implemented by Tsar Ivan the Terrible in Russia between 1565 and 1572. The policy included institution of secret police, mass repressions, public executions, and confiscation of land from Russian aristocrats.
Reasons of Mongol’s victory: powerful of Mongol’s army; feudal division on Rus’; constant wars between Russian princes of different areas; underestimation of the enemy forces; catholic aggression in the Western borders.
Cossack Yermak - Cossack who led the Russian conquest of Siberia, in the reign of Tsar Ivan the Terrible.
Idea of Moscow as “Third Rome” - probably written by the monk Filofei in the early sixteenth century; Doctrine declared that “two Romes have fallen [Catholic Rome and Constantinople], the third [Moscow] stands, and a fourth there shall not be”; Rus’ was here proclaimed as the successor of the first two embodiments of Imperial Christian power, or at least as the new protector of the Christian realm.
The ‘Time of Troubles’ – period of absence of legitimate political authority, exacerbated by economic disaster, social tensions and foreign invasion; On Ivan IV’s death in 1584, he was succeeded by his son FёdorIvanovich (r.1584-1598), a pious, passive ruler; Fёdor had no children and other Ivan IV’s son Dmitrii died in 1591(under strange circumstances); the Riurikid dynasty was extinguished.
Nikon’s Church reform: Nikon (Patriarch from 1652 to 1666) with the support of the Tsar started a reform; The Russian liturgy was revised to bring it into line with the Byzantine (most notably, the church began to mandate the use of three fingers instead of two in making the sign of the cross); Many churchgoer were opposed the reform, because it destroyed the centuries-old traditions, and their pastors disliked reading books which were printed in the heretic West; To escape persecution the Old Believers fled to the territories of the Don, the White Sea and even beyond the Ural Mountain; Despite Nikon’s conflict with Tsar and his removal from the post of the head of Russian Orthodox Church, reforms were continued; AlekseiMichailovich wanted to make Russia the center of Eastern Christianity. Interests of the majority of population, who were against reform, were sacrificed to the Imperial ambitions of power.
Reasons of reforms of Peter the Great - 1.economic obsolescence; 2. the threat of war from European and Asian countries; 3. political isolation of Russia; 4. cultural differences between Russia and Europe; 5. the ambitions of Peter the Great.
Petrine reforms in culture - ‘civil’ script (newspapers, book publishing); transformation noble life-styles (assemblies, fashion…); development of science (Academy of Sciences, university); development of art (“Petrine baroque”).
Consequences of the reforms of Peter the Great - Russia became a powerful Empire; Russia got out in the Baltic sea (“window to Europe”); the dominance of European cultural values among the nobility; industrial growth; strengthening the serfdom system; heavy tax burden; bureaucratization.
‘The Gendarme of Europe’ – label of Nicholas I because of his aim to prevent revolutions in Europe
“Peacemaker” – nickname of Alexander III
Dual power (Dvoyevlastiye) - a situation in the wake of the February Revolution in which two powers, the workers councils (or Soviets, particularly the Petrograd Soviet) and the official state apparatus of the Provisional Government coexisted with each other and competed for legitimacy.
Prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surpluses (in excess of an absolute minimum) from peasants for centralized distribution among the remaining population during War Communism.
War communism - the economic and political system that existed in Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War, from 1918 to 1921.It aimed to abolish private trade, control labour, nationalize all large-scale industry, and at its height in 1920 to replace the money system with a universal system of state rationing.
Collectivization - policy adopted by the Soviet government, pursued most intensively between 1929 and 1933, to transform traditional agriculture in the Soviet Union and to reduce the economic power of the kulaks (prosperous peasants). Under collectivization the peasantry were forced to give up their individual farms and join large collective farms (kolkhozy). The process was ultimately undertaken in conjunction with the campaign to industrialize the Soviet Union rapidly.
Stakhanovism - a method for increasing production by rewarding individual initiative, developed in the Soviet Union in 1935. Named after A.G. Stakhanov, Soviet coal miner, the worker first awarded benefits under the system in 1935.
The Great Terror (The Great Purge) (1936-1938) - campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union. It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants and the Red Army leadership, and widespread police surveillance, suspicion of “saboteurs”, imprisonment, and arbitrary executions.
The Road of Life – ice road winter transport route across the frozen Lake Ladoga, which provided the only access to the besieged city of Leningrad.
Shtrafbats – Soviet punishment or penal battalions, were made up of deserters, political prisoners, and former prisoners of war who had returned from German captivity.
The iron curtain -the physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991.
Eastern Bloc – name used for the communist states of Central and Eastern Europe:Hungarian People's Republic, Polish People's Republic, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Socialist Republic of Romania,German Democratic Republic,People's Republic of Albania(to 1960), People's Republic of Bulgaria Republic, Yugoslavia (to 1948).
“The Thaw” - period from the early 1950s to the early 1960s when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were relaxed, and millions of Soviet political prisoners were released from Gulag labor camps due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinization.
The Virgin Lands Campaign – Khrushchev’s plan to plow and cultivate previously uncultivated land. The aim was dramatically boost the Soviet Union’s agricultural production in order to alleviate the food shortages plaguing the Soviet populace.
Perestroika – a political movement for reformation within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the 1980s, widely associated with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost (meaning “openness”) policy reform.
The main reasons for the victory of the Soviet Union in Great Patriotic war - For the Soviet people this was a Holy war for their country and for their lives, not for the ideology or Stalin;Courage and heroism of the people;Quick transformation of the economy to the military sphere;The rich resources of the country;Stalin learned from his mistakes and gave latitude to his professional commanders, notably Zhukov.
Abbreviations:
Cheka (Chrezvychainaiakomissiia) (Extraordinary Commission toCombat Counter-revolution and Sabotage)- Soviet state security organizations.(With the introduction of the New Economic Policy the Soviet government reorganized the Cheka into the GPU which was succeeded by the OGPU, NKVD, and KGB).
Comintern (Kommunisticheskiiinternatsional) - an organisation based inMoscow that devised strategies for Communist Partiesaround the world).
Gulag (Gosudarstvennoeupravlenielagerei) - State Administration of Camps.
KGB (Komitetgosudarstvennoibezopastnosti) - Committee for State Security, the Soviet political police in the late Soviet period,successor to Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD and otherorganisations.
Komsomol (Kommunisticheskiisoiuzmolodezhi) - Communist Youth League.
NEP (Novaiaekonomicheskaiapolitika) - New Economic Policy. Economic policy of Soviet Russia proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it “state capitalism”.
NKVD Narodnyikomissariatvnutrennykhdel - People’s Commissarist of Internal Affairs.
OGPU United Main Political Administration - political police,successor to the ChEKA and GPU, predecessor of the NKVD.
Politburo - Political Bureau - highest decision-making body in the Communist Party.
RKKA - Workers and Peasants' Red Army.
RSDRP (Rossiiskaiasotsial-demokraticheskaiarabochaiapartiia) - Russian Social DemocraticWorkers’ Party.
RSFSR (RossiiskaiaSovetskaiaFederativnaiaSotsialisticheskaiaRespublika) - Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
USSR - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
